Ralph Monday’s most recent poem to appear here was “Seagirl” (September 2016) 

Light and Love
By Ralph Monday

Think of an old, moldering love
letter hidden away in the attic of
the dead, perfume still lingering
like beach flesh rotted in the sun.

Message taken out when the house
was demolished, held in the hands
after decades of dark betrayal, the
worker spying its contents, digging
up its buried secrets.

Confined in the hand the stationary
thin and fragile as Egyptian papyrus,
knowing light for the first time
since Berlin fell.

Secrets of the heart spilled out like a
cracked oyster:

Mary, I hope this finds you well
I won’t be coming home after all
it’s the light, Mary, the light

And love

I found both at Normandy
the cold slate water,
bloody bodies everywhere,
bobbing in the water headless,
lying torn and broken on the beach,
men calling out to god and the devil

the march across France,
girls in summer dresses
wine and water
burnt out buildings and corpses

and light, Mary,
light and love all over
dripping from rusted tanks,
colonnades, dusty roads,
muddy, bombed out fields
all the people like cherubs,
like happy seraphim
gleeful children play with my gun
girls weave garlands of flowers
in my hair

they pay no heed to the rot and fire
of the concentration camps
for theirs is bread and beer and
fine butter

but it was in the Bavarian Alps
past Berchtesgaden high high
so high in the light that I
unzipped heaven

there I drowned in light and love
I know you will be happy for me
I met Adelind who piped for the
children

and we went away into the white,
the snow, the clear blue ice caressing
the sides of mountains

she told me about her German forebears
the sweet SS of Nuremberg, the eagle
that soars with us to these mountain
tops

where we lie like ripe stones in a field
eternally embraced by light and love

you will understand
our little one will understand
she too will one day know these same fields

Then the crumpled paper ossuary in a
worker’s hands, lit the cigar, became
the torch for the house’s crematory
debris and he did not know
Gehenna’s glee.