Diane Elayne Dees
writes, gardens and practices psychotherapy in Louisiana. Two of her poems were nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2006, and she has poetry recently published or forthcoming in Moondance, The Raintown Review, Out of Line, Mobius, and the Syracuse Cultural Workers’ Women Artists Datebook.
Diane publishes Women Who Serve, a blog about women's professional tennis, and contributes to the Mother Jones MoJo Blog.
—Back to Work Poetry Contents—
|
My Mother Sews Hats
Propaganda swing screeches from Radio Hamburg;
a drunken Haw-Haw mimics Churchill as buzz bombs
drone by, while my mother sews hats
for soldiers. Seams perfect, folds to the quarter-inch;
each must pass inspection; perfect hats for England's
finest. The Germans ban swing music, but on the radio,
Charlie and his Orchestra jazz “Let's go bombing”
while my mother sews hats for soldiers.
She loves three men: her brother, her fiancé,
and her brother-in-law. Two of them are at the front.
She carries their photographs; they look stunning
in their stern resolve and perfect hats.
My mother is untermenschen—her brothers and sisters
in God riding on slow trains. She says Hitler buries
people alive. She will tell this tale her whole life,
even to a child who craves a bedtime story.
The ladies in London, the rumor goes, wear metal hats
to deflect the missiles when they go to town.
Sometimes, at night, they go to tea dances, where big band
sounds are drowned out by sirens, and dancers foxtrot
to the Underground, like people buried alive. Some
come up for air and never return. Others, like my mother,
live to spend another day sewing hats for soldiers.
My mother writes poems and plots schemes while
Charlie sings “Let's go shelling where they’re dwelling.”
She puts out fires with buckets of sand as Blitzkrieg
dust fills her lungs and dive bombers fill her past
with volcanic matter. Hope and Glory are obscured
by explosive clouds. Nothing is the way it used to be,
but the trains are still running in Poland. Building by
building, London comes down. Man by man,
soldiers go down, and my mother goes down
to the factory each day. A cup of tea, a letter,
a tidbit of gossip, an air raid, a funeral, a paycheck,
a turn of events. Every moment rings with meaning,
while my mother—who loves to sing and dance
and drink shandies on Saturday night—
who knows every lyric to every song, sings along
as she sews hats for soldiers.
Originally published in Passager, 2005
Note: Radio Hamburg was a station of the Nazi German international broadcasting network that aimed programs at the British Isles during World War II. The station's most notorious personality was Lord Haw-Haw (American-born William Joyce), who broadcast demoralizing propaganda against England.
|
