Some year of mine,
possibly twelve,
Grandfather slid his heavy black scrapbook
across my weak knees.
"It's time you knew about the war," he says,
and leaves me alone with the leathered thing.
My older brother had warned me
this day would come:
"Look quick," he'd said,
"Or you'll have nightmares forever."
So, I look with defiant twelve-year slowness.
The pictures are not in any mindful order--
On one page a man is bandaged and limbless,
on the next he poses, armed and legged,
with a naked Samoan girl.
And only one portrait of my Grandfather,
His bare back to the camera
Head cocked over his shoulder
Examining his own, narrow flogging wounds,
each an exclamation.
Even in black and white
I can see the colors of pain
in their broken-veined beauty
Rich red rolling moistly down his pink skin,
like the ocean in action--
water on sand.
blood on back.
And though he has only photographed
their flesh-torn, twice-dead bodies,
i know in all my twelve-year knowing
He must have loved them all--
'Krauts and Japs.