Here is the place my mother fled: An ivy-covered garden shed
A quaint and crooked call-to-arms
By hook-latch-linger in the deeper shade
In here you're locked for thick, hot days.
And here is where you'll hold yourself, careful 'round the middle, to remind you that July is troubled, hot, but never murderous.

With a bang to make Israel proud, you straddled the pipeline.
Without a flame to mark your step, nor dram to sting your throat,
With a trowel began to dig
Upon the lock so deeply sullied (rusted root and picker's bone into the metal had been sewn)
And long since then
Without a wraith you returned to once-loved place inside a home with no debate upon the usual places: The things a year erases.

And here, in 1944, with whiz-bangs decimating shore
My mother, twenty at the time, fled to this shed with glistening key
In shining lock;
Held back the front of years ago
Remembered by the woman before her.

Here now, the lock is crippled in old age
With amputated arm-and-leg (a horror of the shell-fire on the beach).
And shall I light a candle for our fickle close relations?
A shrine to bitter standoff 'tween our nerve-end generation?
Bleeding not for nation but for "Surely, you will understand a stronger hand has come to take the worn-in place of yours" --
This must be why the garden shed, the shell-hole where my mother fled, lies in the shade
A perfect place to calculate
A massive and decisive raid.

And here's the spot we drank of wine which had grown sweet in little time
And traced your lips on fingertips
And finally decided I was better off within the light
Cast by a candle in the shed
Where momentarily we'd fled
To cull from one another: Love, the July we'd been detailed of for years before our meetings here, and inexplicably, I fear: Until now, I'd been wary of this fettered afternoon
Blistering and festooned
On every porch from which the war-parade is now inspected
And here, with cautious kiss, I send you off.