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Alan Harris reading
War Baby
by Alan Harris
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After I came beginningless into Illinois in 1943 as a first-born joy, I drank World War II in with my sweet mother's milk. Bombs were dropping quietly behind her caring embrace and exploding in her goodnight kiss. I breathed her worried love and thought it was air if I thought at all. Twenty-five times my father thrust his B-17 "Spot Remover" carrying ten trembling airmen through German defenses and sowed the karmic seeds of a quick explosive harvest-- while I was piling up wooden blocks and hearing rhymes about moons and spoons and thumbs and plums. So much war-worried gentleness was transmitted by my mother's reassuring smile that perhaps I heard small voices back in my throat screaming for mercy as they laughed. My father came home a new stranger who wanted to be king of the little home my mother and I had shared. Who was this intruder, this usurper? He wrecked our delicate bond with his love and his jubilant grief after peace was declared with Hitler tucked into a coffin. I wanted to play with cars and building blocks like before but my father dared to order me around like a bomber crew and have me bring him things. Wasn't it about then that I learned to kill flies? |
From the book Heartclips (1996)
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