During The War Poem by Robert Dawson

During the War

My age during the war, my old man had a pin-
pricked ear. His war effort was hauling loads
of curved prefabricated rafters to army towns.
Alone in a house with outdoor stairs,
mother and I made a game of pounding
margarine yellow and rolling tinfoil into balls.
Afraid of the stairs at night she'd come into my bed.
After the war we lived in a quonset hut.

My cot under the bare rib rafters, the kind
father trucked, was more a crib than a bed,
so short my panda slept on the floor. School
was over the tracks. Sixth graders in red
canvas jackets paraded the little kids home
in double file. None of their routes
circled the quonsets, so we huddled to school alone.

We were a class ourselves, all sixes and sevens.
Our heroes were kids. We raided across the tracks
to horsetrade comics. In our wars blonds and girls
were Germans. I ruled the roost by inventing
impossible losses to handfuls of green GIs.
Our old men routed us racing bikes on the railroad ties.

Mother and father slept on the foldaway couch
mother spanked me across one day until the back-
spring snapped. A girl child had lied I'd unwrapped
her playpants. After, we carried my cot
to the kitchen every night …

Tired now, I rub my eyes until my fresh scrawl purples.
Married, undraftable, I'm twenty-three. My Germans,
the masked guard I invented in my bed,
still murder me in my sleep each night.

from SIX MILE CORNER - Houghton Mifflin 1966