Medals Poem by Paul Hartal

An enormous explosion threw the boy out of his bed.
He woke up on the carpeted floor, wiping out with his left hand
the crumbs of an interrupted dream. The room shook up as
another bomb detonated nearby with ear-piercing noise.
Shimmering red patches of light flared up in the dark ink
of the night.

Mother rushed into the room panic-stricken taking him down
in a hurry to the bomb shelter. This was merely a basement
shared with other people during the bomb raids.

When the sirens sounded the all clear sign it was already
morning. In the apartment the latched doors had burst off
their hinges. The window glasses shattered into a variety
of splinters and the striped curtain in the living room
became a colony of ribbons.

Looking out of the windowless room he saw long tongues
of flames shooting up from an incendiary bomb that fell on
the pavement. And then starting with a strange swishing
sound, like the tearing of a delicate lustrous fibre, the walls
of a house across the street folded up in a loud rumbling
thunder.

Mother later told him that the collapsing building buried
several people, including children. A boy of his age was
among them. She looked at him with a curious expression
which he never saw before and it made him feel
very uncomfortable.

“Oh”, sighed mother, “war is so terrible, so cruel and futile.
It is made by dour and stupid men in uniforms, decorated
with many medals, who really never grew up.”

“But father also had many medals”, the boy said.
Mother looked at him gently for a while. “Yes, indeed,
he had”, she said.

There was great sadness in her eyes.