Spawning Poem by Jan Oskar Hansen

Spawning


The children, in the street near the factories, looked unfriendly
avoid them, and my brother said their mothers where whores
spawning Nazis during the war.
Their mothers had haircuts at the police station, bald as eggs
serves them right they and their children should be
sent back to Germany.
The street, also ours, was typically working-class no gardens
no colour anywhere like living in a maze of greyness and damp.
My brother had his knowledge from listening to the adults,
men who had done nothing under the Nazi occupation except
trading with the enemy for cigarettes and booze and using
their wives as bait.
Now they were heroes pulling the headdress of the unlucky
calling them whores, but like so many things that too ended.
Hair grows back beautiful women in the street, and the Norwegian
are blessed with short memories.