The Kentszyn Girl Poem by John a'Beckett

Our thick, imagined forest finds
the Kentszyn girl out mushrooming;
curious, neat, folk-pattern-dressed
attentive to the distant wolf howl
flash of fox in dusk hush looming,
what the wind-dropp melting snow
reveals in snatch-hum song along:
that amber twinkling in the dark
gems to catch her sudden interest
Peeling back the sapling bark

she finds the German helmet sunk
moss-covered deep into the mud,
then rusty rails in bent direction,
Instinct now gives her the bearing
to grass grown over granite? Not
what was once upon a clearing
and the steel thick rusting rods
so twisted up to grasp the sky that
giants must have rested here till
driven out by warring Gods.

Wisdom in her home-going song
tells her parents what she saw
that it was Wolf-Hitler’s lair, his
concrete fortress till his hunters
trapped him in the Berlin bunker
She too young to catch the fact that
bombs ripped all this stone apart
The wolf escaped, but we know
now deep in her Slavonic heart
that in all this she’s not far wrong.