Sample Poems by John Drury

From “The Refugee Camp”


1.

In the ruined city
of toymakers and singing guilds,
they were so fanatical at the war’s end
even civilians fought,
shooting from rubble, from cellar windows.

I climb the cobbled streets
to Heathen’s Tower
past half-timbered houses and the repaired
wreckage of air strikes, patchworks
of clean and weathered quarrystone.

When I say to a friend, Too bad
we bombed the churches,
he corrects me:
the Nazis used them
to quarter the Gestapo.

And yet—a song remains,
if only a clashing music,
as trams wrench
around tight corners, whining
as power lines spark, in Nuremberg.

2.

Each morning I trudge uphill
to the refugee camp where I work.
Aliens huddle by the vestibule
while officials brush past,
muttering a password
to the guard at a glassed-in booth
who buzzes them—and me—
through the heavy door.
Turned back, the refugees grumble and curse,
kick cinders in the parking lot.

Everyone says they carry knives,
hands jammed in pockets,
their faces half scraped, half stubble,
women left behind
in cramped flats or muddy villages.
They stare at our questionnaires
and leave too many blanks.
I learn Do you know nothing, sir?
and See you later, mister
in languages I will never begin to fathom.

3.

How fitting that the camp
borders the old imperial city,
once a crossroads, a stopping point
on the treacherous, overland trade route
to Venice and the orient.

How fitting that the patron saint,
a hermit named Sebaldus,
lived in the forest
and turned icicles to firewood,
his tomb lifted up by carved snails.

How fitting that, in the stadium,
rallies arose like architecture:
pillars of light, brass bands
and brown-shirted blocks, a cobblestone
courtyard of helmets.

How fitting, too, that the burghers
who smeared a silver cross
with paint, to fool looters in the Middle Ages,
passed on their nickname:
“Blackeners of God.”

4.

From the castle, walk down
past the knight with his heels on a dragon,
past the woodwork and bull’s eye glass of Dürer’s house,
past the antique shops, dark with Menorahs,
past the town hall’s dungeons,
past the golden fountain, with Moses near the top,
past the young albino caning a chair,
past the baker pressing almonds into gingerbread,
past the stone ox alongside the Meat Bridge,
past the restaurant over the river.

Turn right at the green-gold spires of St. Lawrence
and loiter by tables of campaign leaflets
and clusters of burghers debating,
poking fingers in the air,
by the ancient men with one leg, or one arm,
asleep in wheelchairs, heads back in the sun,
by bitter-faced crones in black shawls,
by piles of coins, shining between empty trousers,
by a man with five watches on his wrist,
by a blind man playing an accordion.

5.

Praise to the chamber music
in the castle of Frederick Barbarossa.

Praise to Dürer’s last journey
to the North Sea, to sketch a beached whale.

Praise to the organist in the loft
retracing her steps, her intricate pedalwork.

Praise to the cobbler who mends cracked heels
and reinforces eyelets in a boot.

Praise to the tankards and cut-glass bowls,
to the breakfast beer and blue trout.

Praise to the robber knight whose horse
leapt the wall, whose hoofmarks are nicked in stone.

Praise to David, the apprentice, who knows
the gleaming-thread melody and how to trim leather.

Praise to my attic room, and the bathtub downstairs
that empties on the floor of the cellar.

Praise to the woman dentist I greet on the stairs
and the padded chair I glimpse on my way up.

Praise to macaroons and hot blueberry wine,
to the walled city, to tunnels with deep-set skylights.