That was 1942, the year my father
was studying to be a locksmith,
working in an underground cell,
he was shopped to the Germans,
locked up in the Zenica Prison
when a bottle came sailing through the bars,
he couldn’t open a door,
I suppose he hadn’t graduated yet.
A bottle with a tail like a comet,
then another and another,
a crowd gathered on the street below.
If one green bottle should accidently fall,
they’ll be ninety-nine prisoners burning in a cell,
but if nine green bottles should accidently fall,
you know it’s the Serbs outside shouting:
Kill the Turks! Kill the Turks!
The heat was so strong the bars almost melted.
The building collapsed — another miracle,
in the chaos of fumes and smoke,
he escaped to the hills
with a fireman’s taste for vodka ever since.
When I was a child he used to drink in the kitchen;
the letters in cyrillic on the bottle before him.
They retook the village in winter.
Rounding up the Serbs, they locked them into St. Nepo’s —
a proper locksmith now, he must have graduated
with the owls on the nightwatch.
No getting out of there. The stained-glass windows
melting like a lolly made from the ice of a rainbow.
It seemed as though the sun was rising inside the church.
But the purpose of stained glass
isn’t to see the world outside,
it’s to illuminate the dark within.
Like father like sun. He’s still putting out that fire.
There’s still smoke in his lungs.
He needs every drop he can get.
Laurence O’Dwyer | The Giraffes
Contents | Mudlark No. 75 (2023)