We open the bottom drawer.  It rasps in its weight,
new wounds stretch across this sharpness,
its screech is shrapnel past our ears.
 
The contents rattle our excitement though we should be grieving.
We are kneeling at an alter to her life.  In its depths
our sighs swerve like swallows.  This is a guilty pleasure
 
as we pluck at the filigree of her life; childrens' drawings,
pasta necklaces brittle with age, holiday tea towels never used,
their folds set in years of darkness.
 
We have differing shades of association
as we pass these parcels.  “Oh look” you say at each turn
as the sarcophagus, laid bare, exhales its contents.
 
At the bottom of this bottom drawer,
the depths kept for winter showers in the armchair,
we find an album.
 
She had been to Germany after the war.
There had been silk pictures from the Black Forest,
a wooden plaque with its teutonic inscription
 
“Gib uns heute unser tägliches brot”.
She had taught us to count to ten
as she gave us our daily bread.
 
Now huddled quiet on the bedroom floor
we see the ghost of her at twenty four,
hiking with friends in unknown hills,
 
lounging at a café flaunting the smile of youth
with the sun in its face. Faded notes in white ink
confirm names and places, as though left for us.
 
We stop short at one.  She is holding flowers,
in front of a sign which catches our breath:
“This is the site of the infamous Belsen concentration camp”.
 
Behind it, desolation.  A tall wooden cross stands stark
at the world’s end.  It punches a hole in the sky.
Her silence on this is suddenly resounding.
 
All those years, not mentioned once.
Was it unimportant? After children did this life
seem archaic, the perspective of it
 
lengthening its shadow to a rock in a distant sea?
Was it our selfishness that never thought to ask more
about the dreams of this woman, younger now than us?
 
Outside the deep blue sky slowly darkens.
She has crossed a bridge between her life, and ours,
and we wonder, in a new found loss, where she laid her flowers.