Your Return

VOLUME 10 TABLE OF CONTENTS

YOUR RETURN

My friend, my heart, my shadow kin,

welcome back from your dark world,

your bone-age midnight of the soul.

No more sitting among potted trees

staring across the mall,

my beloved painter, whose therapy

it was to paint canvas a dull green

and be happy to call it earth.

To make peace with the flies.

To take catastrophe in stride.

You return from a city of learning

the ramshackle haunts of the young,

the starving, the naked, renegades

from close quarters of the fearful

where you eat the bird in hand,

draw portraits of the dead for an egg.

Your journey was inward

to a place at the foot of the mountain

where the god comes down to meet you

in his black SS uniform,

where borders between countries

are deep age wrinkles of civilization.

You came back to us

not from a dream, but a struggle

to find something left within

still worthy of human expression…

after the firing squads

and the families killed

for hiding you

in their cellars and barns.

You smile and say,

“I had a great time,

the time of my life,

you should have been there.”

“I was dashing and brave,”

you say,

dressed as an old woman in a blanket,

stealing clothes from clotheslines.

You didn’t give up on dignity

or justice, or the land of the free.

You returned to a hero’s welcome

more puzzled and alone than

you ever were over there.

Here, it was the personal solutions

that you found so hard to reinvent,

the ones that come full flower

when the inner mountain

is finally worn down by a trickle

of understanding.

My uncle Jimmie Pond is the guy in the middle holding the
homemade11 striped flag, while a POW in Italy 1942-3