The World According to Poetry #21
Dunkirk
By Stephanie Wood Miller © 2019
And then harbor becomes escape
Instead of haven
The ways and wounds we leave behind us
Enemies closing
And someone at our backs spending their last
Drop of hope
So we can follow lifelines
Out of safety
Away from the land
All the bitter conflict
Rage, hunger, grasping
And under the sea
Sea monsters roil
Hungering for the taste of our blood
This is what we live with
Now
The men gunning at our backs
And the smoke of the trucks, corpse and stores
That turned from hope
To desolation
And though monsters never swallowed us whole
We wander in the dark
Even when we were home