Margot Poem by Herbert Nehrlich

Margot was her name,
she drove if you could call it that
a blue Isetta, made by
Bavarian Motor Works.
For those of you who don't
it's a velociped of sorts,
the door in front, just one,
and just enough of useful space
to have a High School student,
a skinny one at that, who did
without a sliver of a doubt
adore the sight of you, Jeezus.

You were a trifle more advanced,
ten years ahead of dodobird,
that's what you called me
after reading Kontiki, by Heyerdahl.
You'd drive your sky-blue box
down main street in our town
and I would be the one right there,
you'd stop and let me lean
through the large window, crouching
as I did, to get a better look at you.

I always prayed that Mr. Colgate had,
with his unlimited concern for us
done quite enough for me, I did not want,
nor should she be the victim of
the common halitosis. Well, it was,
as I remember, an affair of simple love.

She said I had to wait for that first kiss
until the New Year showed its ugly face.
No one could know what was in store,
there was the Russians with their guns,
the Bay of Pigs and now they'd shot
the only hope this world had left, the one
who will be known to generations yet to come
as a Berliner, which he was, like no one else,
perhaps Marlene Dietrich would have loved
and stroked his locks which hung about,
but never mind she said, and she would ask,
(a hidden promise in her voice) for silence,
just sitting there in that small box of Thyssen steel,
it was a victory of sorts but not enough,
just cheek to cheek and holding hands as such.

I used my best, the knowledge of debating,
learned in a school that was not privy of
nor would it ever understand this burning love,
what if, I said, the Russkies launch the bomb,
and then the Yanks retaliate, it will be all
that God can do to count the bodies of his sheep!
And it could well be that we are dead and never kissed.

Let's take, I argued on for hours and for days,
that opportunity as it presents itself, that's NOW.
What a recalcitrant, I had to pick a girl with brains,
with silly principles and that Teutonic discipline.
I was, you bet your bottom boxershorts, right there,
and when that beauty of a clock did strike at last
she scooped me up, that is what I recall my friends,
and it was heaven here on earth, it surely was.

You know, it is a strange and even weird, though normal mind,
this is the year that she has turned another leaf,
to reach the big seven-oh, like aging grandmas do.
But there will be a simple entry, all in red,
in my itinerary, next I go, to stop and say hello.
I figure that the end of the old year would do,
I'd give her a small hint about arrivals there at Tegel,
what do you think, it might be wise to start my prayers,
it's really all I want, a small repeat of sixty-three.