Embedded Files
The Historia Copy
By Claire Gardien
I am ten years old.
Mom and I are sitting in the commuter train back from Paris to our village, at the edge of the forest. A bit earlier, we had some pastries at a small tea room across the railway station. We got some good stuff to read at a newsstand, too. It is my birthday, so, both of us are longing to treat ourselves.
I got two books, to-day. Mom bought her usual fashion magazine and a Historia copy. As the train drives through the suburbs, I peer into Mom’s face. Her features have somewhat dulled.
wrinkles
something I can’t decipher
throughout
So sorrowed… I stand up again and again to glance at what she is reading. Each time I do so, she hides her page. There are manyHistoria copies at home and I’m not allowed to leaf through them.
The train now rides in the countryside. The twilight arouses my curiosity. On the train window, our silhouettes are blurred and unmoving in the yellow light of the suburb train. Are-we getting erased… the forest grows thicker along the track.
ghostly boughs
tree leaves dance ... our shades
unreal
Scary thought… The magazine stands as a hindrance to our usual dialogues. I get nervous, and ends sitting down for good.
At last, we get down of the train in the fresh spring air. Nothing so wrong after all, birds are singing as ever, enjoying our company along the way.
Home, at last. I start watching my birthday books, while thinking of the magazine.
“This is no book for children. Don’t go for it, please.”
I have to know, though. Out of the sideboard, the nasty cigarette smell of the train surges again.
grey pictures
a scattering of debris
on an empty square
All walls have fallen apart. All of them burnt. Paths covered with cinders connect the different pages. On the ash grey pavement, a man is asleep. I stare at his charcoal face. His nose and eyes sockets have melted. He belongs to some other world. I get some words, here and there. All of them... peasants … assembled in the church. Fire... Gunned.
An odour of cinders seeps through the cigarette smoke. Blood throbs at my tempers.
This is my first encounter with death.
not a single house
standing in the village
Oradour-sur-Glane
Pea Soup: A childhood memory
By Hans Jongman
Even before opening the front door I already knew my mother was preparing my favourite meal. Mouthwatering aroma filled the hallway leading to the kitchen. There, a heavy stockpot was simmering on the stove. Pea soup! Not the kind one buys readymade in the fast food section at the local convenience store, but the traditional Dutch type consisting of smoked pork sausages, pig's trotters (pig feet) ham stocks and smoked bacon, and added for good measure split peas, carrots, and herbs.
a blanket of snow
my childhood dreams
revisited
Rememberance
By Hans Jongman
Even today, 65 years after World War 2 ended, Dutch children are taught the history of the war. Mentioning "the War" like in that famous John Cleese skit in Faulty Towers, is readily understood to mean World War 2, regardless of the many wars that followed.
Remembrance Day
around the hole in the ice
wintering geese
Each Christmas, Dutch schoolchildren place a candle on the grave of a fallen soldier.
darkening sky
old soldiers
at the graves of soldiers
Remembrance Day parade
the war bride joins her Canuck
one step out of sync
Shadows
By Hans Jongman
Too many war crimes have been whitewashed by revisionists. That the 1933-45 Nazi regime was the vilest in human history, of that there's no doubt. "Two wrongs don't make a right" is an apt way to help us remember the terrible loss of life on the civilian population, in particular Germany and Japan. Massive incendiary phosphoric bombs were used on Germany to suck out the air in vortexes of fire, with the ultimate weapon of destruction, the A-bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Veteran's ward...
the shadow of a bulldog
on a whitewashed wall
Swooning to the Melodic
By Hans Jongman
Just before Christmas '09, a much honoured Dunkirk veteran invited my wife and I for a toast. This past summer he passed away at the age of 94, one of the last of that selected group that in 1940 numbered just over 300,000. These soldiers and airmen were miraculously rescued from the French beachhead. Returning to British soil, he was informed that his wife and two children had been killed during the Blitz when their house had suffered a direct hit.
sweethearts
enter the photo-mat
for old times sake
He chose not to return on leave. He served in the RAF as a tail gunner, and told us remarkable anecdotes including about how he at 6'1 was not your average tail gunner because he was way to tall. But somehow, always managed to fit into the bubble. Than he played for us on his Hammond. When the old airman pulled the knobs of the organ manual, all the lights on the organ lit up like a magical vaudeville show.
swooning to the melodic...
deft fingers of the veteran
trigger a flood of memories
snow laden...
looming over the graves
cell-phone towers
The Hunger Winter, 1944-45
By Hans Jongman
After the disastrous September 1944 Allied airborne landings at Arnhem, the Netherlands, code named Market Garden and since remembered as "A bridge too far"...the daily food rations for the people living in the German occupied provinces of North and South Holland was further reduced from approximately 550 calories a day to 230 calories, if food was available at all. Thousands of people starved to death. More and more ration cards were needed for even the handfuls of turnips, sugar beets, and even tulip bulbs were almost gone. Nettles were used for something resembling tea. Not enough wood was available to make caskets, not even firewood was available during the extreme cold winter. People cut down trees even at the risk of getting shot. Houses damaged by aerial bombings were stripped of its doors and floor planks. In April 1945 talks were held between Allied negotiators and their German counterparts.
A ceasefire was proposed to allow RAF and USAAF bombers, together with Polish and Canadian squadrons, to drop food above still occupied Holland. Just days before Germany's capitulation, Operation Manna commenced. Like a biblical miracle, between April 29 and May 8, 1945, bombers dropped approximately 12,000 ton of food from the sky at designated drop zones. Thousands of emaciated people thankfully waved at the low flying planes.
a gust of wind
maple keys
airborne
abandoned airstrip
a junked bush plane
impaled on a plinth
looping another stitch
the leathermaker adjusts
a telescopic light
Haibun
By Steve Mangan
I saw my granddad strolling up ahead and tried to mimic his walk: the rhythm of his stride, the swing of arms - how he held his head, shaped his hands - and in the moment that I had it I found myself inside his eyes, his length of spine. In shock I stopped and broke the spell, and as I stopped he stumbled, fell. As he rose he saw me standing there, came to me and, telling me "Never do that again," took my hand and walked me home.
a bird's skull:
from its sockets
I see me looking
I woke in the night and saw her on the landing at the top of the stairs, standing in the darkness with a stillness that seemed to slow everything down. Although she was just a silhouette, I knew it was Mrs. Hall; despite that she seemed so strangely tall, her head nearly touching the ceiling. Against the pull of fear, I pushed myself to get up and make my way to my parents' bedroom. I felt her watching me, but she did not move. At the landing, I edged sideways along the wall, reaching beside me for the handle of my parents' door. The silence and the shadows were broken by light and the noise of my baby sister crying, my parents yelling at each other. Mum noticed me in the doorway and shouted at me to get back to bed; I burst into tears and cried out that Mrs. Hall was on the stairs. Dad looked around the house but there was nobody there. It was only a dream they assured me. Next day Mrs. Hall was found hanging through the attic space at the top of her stairs, her smothered baby shrouded in a sheet. We were moved into her house a few months later. When I saw Mrs. Hall on the night that she died, it wasn't to be the last time I'd see her.
candle smoke
from a pumpkin smile:
darkened eyes
Some Indian roads
By Harrisham Minhas
We are on the way to the airport at 4 in the morning. In this darkness, a teenager cycles towards his tuition classes, with a heavy backpack on his back. An old lady worker searches for metal splinters by moving a magnet-stick besides the road. Some rickshaw drivers somehow manage to sleep on their rickshaws in a way which makes it look effortless. Some autorickshaw drivers sleep on the pedestal outside closed shutters of shops.
behind a broad tree
a light shines
in the small temple
The advertisement banners outside the hotels and malls shine distinctly. Three men repair a scooter on the road-side. The windows of an empty school are lit by the street lights. A middle-aged couple are on their early-morning walk with their Pomeranian. In a small restaurant, cooks knead some dough and prepare curries alfresco. Occasionally, we cross other vehicles at this deserted time. A small truck ahead of us is stacked with newspapers of the day.
holding the truck's rear
firmly with one hand
a cyclist avoids pedaling
Kindergarten
By Harrisham Minhas
mimicry rehearsals
on the school ground
many parrots assemble
In those days, terrorist activities were prevalent in our area. But being a child, I was not aware of this fact, nor did my parents scare me of the possible danger around. Everything was normal for me. My parents were attending my school's annual function. I was dressed in a white and blue colored frock, and had a black kohl dot on my forehead. (As a tradition in India, a tiny spot of kohl is often put somewhere on the faces of kids, to protect them from evil eyes.) I performed in a group song along with other kids of my age. The mike was right in front of me. I was standing in the middle of all of us singers, rehearsed with the light hand-choreography to be accompanied with our song. According to my parents, I was enhancing my mouth-movements so that sitting in the audience, they could be reassured that I was indeed singing. Somewhere in the midst of other performances, two armed men entered the school function ground on a scooter, shouting. There was a strangeness in the vicinities. I observed the worry on my mother's face, which subsided only on learning that those two men were only guised in that particular way for performing an entertainment act.
curfew in the town
the sparrows
overeat today
Likenesses
By John W. Sexton
My son aged four with his drawing of me, the letter d written backwards twice: bab. There I am: a squashed, misshapen head with two wobbly eyes - one bigger than the other. Lopsided hands with short fingers like the teeth in a garden rake. And him smiling up at me that he’d done me so well.
standing
in the outline of the tree
dark starling shit
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