Claudia Emmingham

His memories sleep in a wooden suitcase
that travelled all the way to Tripoli
She had never heard of that place
got left behind rolling cigars twelve hours a day
to feed a whingeing child.
I picture them saying goodbye
at the station that no longer exists.

Forty years on I craved his desert stories;
how he was stung by a scorpion
and the sun turned the sand blood red – I had no idea

He spoke of Stauffenberg, which was good
because we were all antifascists by default –

He never mentioned the Africa corps

But he told me how he met the devil one night
in the forest, after he came back from Libya
and that he pitied me, because I would live through
the next war, more murderous than the previous.

In the end, his face was a thin smile on a starched hospital
pillow and he said how much he liked my new
sparkly-blue braces and that he was too tired to live
in yet another Germany, one with glossy
magazines and countless opportunities.
We held hands for a long time before he said
Mach’s gut mein Spatz (So long, my dear)

Grandma asked for semolina:
warm and milky,
dusted with sugar and cinnamon,
like she used to make for us
on summer days.
It’s the last thing I want,
she whispered,
into the hospice room’s
sacral silence