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KÄThe Kollwitz


ISSUE:  Spring 1981

This morning, sketching in the garden,
suddenly it occurred to me:
I do not think of these flowers
as lovely. Their bright colors
hurt my mind, for they are crimson
as blood seeping from a wounded son,
purple as the bruise on the forehead
of the awkward boy who waited in my doorway
to tell me how his comrade died.
I tell it to myself again
as if to test its truth: my son grew up
to die a soldier. I draw his face
anonymous, gray. Gray mist and rain.
Gray stone. At night I dream I give the children
smiling dolls to hold before they sleep.
Now, while they lie alone, untouched,
warm in little cribs. Now,
while there’s still joy, like a falling star,
inside their bodies.

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