George R. Kramer
Shadows on the Border
At dusk on a late winter day 1951
I am a ragged refugee hiding
On the express train to Paris,
Roaring past the Maginot Line.
Once as grim as the Iron Curtain
Now just a scar of empty bunkers
Across the damp Alsatian hills.
e damp Alsatian hills.
A tunnel comes and darkness amplifies
But fails to smother tenacious hope,
As faithful as a tunnel’s end.
A train blasts by like a shot
And I see phantoms of people
In slivers of dim rushing lights
Passing like me from nothing to nothing.
Everyone I have loved is a shadow now,
Leaving an intimate illusion in my memory.
Their absence as tangible
As silhouettes in a doctored snapshot
As real as that shock
Of air pressure and speed.
Hiding between carriages
In my patchwork clothes
I am shapeless stolen bits of others,
Whose differences from me
Don’t feel as far apart as the difference
I find between me and myself
When I let anger work its power over me.
Twenty nights ago I crawled under barbed wire
At the spot where a villager whispered
That there were no mines.
I had never worked the soil
But that night I loved mud and tall grass
And the earth’s shadow over the guard towers.
Shadows are the ghosts of imagination.
All else leaves you between hearing the police knock
And crawling out the kitchen window with only
What you wear and the last gold coins
That your mother put in your hands
As shadow fell across her face.
*This poem is about my father, who escaped from communist Hungary and became a refugee in France. He is now 92 years old.
George R. Kramer hails from Canada, Colorado, Kenya, New York and Alabama, but is a long-time Virginia transplant. The child of European refugees from Nazism and Communism, his parents' legacy and his peripatetic childhood leave a trace in much of his writing. He makes his living as an attorney. His recent published poems are on his website:
https://blueguitar58.wixsite.com/website-1.
At dusk on a late winter day 1951
I am a ragged refugee hiding
On the express train to Paris,
Roaring past the Maginot Line.
Once as grim as the Iron Curtain
Now just a scar of empty bunkers
Across the damp Alsatian hills.
e damp Alsatian hills.
A tunnel comes and darkness amplifies
But fails to smother tenacious hope,
As faithful as a tunnel’s end.
A train blasts by like a shot
And I see phantoms of people
In slivers of dim rushing lights
Passing like me from nothing to nothing.
Everyone I have loved is a shadow now,
Leaving an intimate illusion in my memory.
Their absence as tangible
As silhouettes in a doctored snapshot
As real as that shock
Of air pressure and speed.
Hiding between carriages
In my patchwork clothes
I am shapeless stolen bits of others,
Whose differences from me
Don’t feel as far apart as the difference
I find between me and myself
When I let anger work its power over me.
Twenty nights ago I crawled under barbed wire
At the spot where a villager whispered
That there were no mines.
I had never worked the soil
But that night I loved mud and tall grass
And the earth’s shadow over the guard towers.
Shadows are the ghosts of imagination.
All else leaves you between hearing the police knock
And crawling out the kitchen window with only
What you wear and the last gold coins
That your mother put in your hands
As shadow fell across her face.
*This poem is about my father, who escaped from communist Hungary and became a refugee in France. He is now 92 years old.
George R. Kramer hails from Canada, Colorado, Kenya, New York and Alabama, but is a long-time Virginia transplant. The child of European refugees from Nazism and Communism, his parents' legacy and his peripatetic childhood leave a trace in much of his writing. He makes his living as an attorney. His recent published poems are on his website:
https://blueguitar58.wixsite.com/website-1.