It was minus 27. The city was drowning in flags.
We closed our still normal windows in order
not to hear the bells. All around the Market Place
enormous white poles had been planted
every one and a half metres, from which fluttered
bloody banners many metres long,
embroidered with a white circle. That same night
more than sixty persons were registered
as having committed suicide.
Having quickly sat down with my back
to the window I could only count the shots,
not the unravelled scarves. While I was binding
bandages, with my common-or-garden nerves,
she told me how precisely to knock upon the door
when a house was ‘liberated’.
The first two days we spent
sitting on our suitcases.
When the porcelain isolators spaced at intervals
began to gleam white over the same forest-in-spring
she suddenly stopped addressing me as ‘Sister’
and, looking desperately English, began kissing
both my hands alternately at high speed:
near perfume, the flowering
of my hands and fingers …
Her dress contains many skirts, one in-between skirt
of upside-down shapes, and geometrically
red endings—long, leafy, earthy ends.
At times she picks up to her northern shoulder
whole armfuls of her skirt to free her feet,
its soft, ladylike materials, its deceiving sash.
We exchanged a short, almost rough,
kiss on the march. You have to back out
of the cell as you leave, and tread on a rag
on the splintering floor, to draw the others
after you. To truly rebuild flowers of globe mallow,
hands outstretched towards the camp.