When I was a kid during the War there were telephone wires,
and on those telephone wires the birds would sit
and twitter and klatsch and wrangle for position
and shit on those who didn’t know better.
A whitish film covered grass, gravel, asphalt,
and patches of black earth left uninhabited.
Repairmen sometimes came wearing strange helmets
and climbing spurs that gave them grip strapped
to their boots so that they could dig into the well-worn wood.
They also had safety belts and climbing ropes.
That’s what my brother explained when he held my hand.
Then he made me press my ear to the wooden pole
so that I could hear the telephone gnomes converse
in small and soft voices. My brother, the future engineer,
the one who made a crystal radio in an old cigar box,
said that it was the wind, perhaps electrical vibrations
from adjacent power lines, or the wood sighing
with sadness when it listened to the many conversations
about the missing and the dead.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 2.
A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels and eight poetry collections, her work has been widely published (and widely rejected) in mostly US poetry journals.
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