The Iron Curtain, 1973
From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic,
an iron curtain has descended on Europe.
----Winston Churchill, 1946
The wilderness was vast. It seemed the land
ran on forever. I was often placed
on guard duty there: houses, red-tiled roofs
atop them. Our caserne (base) was one time
a German army camp; in former days
it displayed sculpted eagles chiseled from
white marble flanking the front gates. Each one
grasped in its claws a circle inscribed with
a swastika (these had been hewn away
by then, the circle plain and smooth).
In front, close by the entry gate that led
into the base—on a glass-covered stand—
a map, never removed, protected by
a pane of glass, showed Deutschland with the old
borders: the Baltic States and parts of France;
the Polish Corridor. It was a map
that showed the land down into Switzerland
and claimed it all as part of Germany.
Ledward Kaserne, where I was stationed as
a soldier, was a base in World War II—
a German base. After the war it would
become a site Americans maintained.
Above each barracks door, sculptured in white,
were images of Ayran warriors, done
to show the ideal of the master race.
The US Army maintained it until
the soldiers left in 2014.
The camp—a Wehrmacht camp at one time—was
transformed into a center for the task
of resettling refugees (at first
a place to flee; then it became a place
people fled to). Now even that has changed.
The iron curtain is gone. The nation states
that people fled from have faded away;
are only history now. The walls yet stand,
as does the Aryan art. But now it is
a witness of what history swept aside;
of unexpected change; or miracle.
David W. Landrum’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including Pulsebeat.
Pulsebeat Poetry Journal 