Sorting Photos

by Leonore Hildebrandt

I grew up in the Nachkriegszeit.

Like seedlings defying

broken soil, we learned to observe

the happy occasions, our birthdays.

The past was treacherous –

our burned city, the rubble

dumped into moats and covered

for wider roads – lessons ravaged

by new routines.

How do I choose my story

without inventing?

The album turns into a book,

or rather a tree whose leaves return

sentiments to their roots, burial sites –

the page replete with unseen losses

about to happen –

a last reunion with all my siblings,

our four faces clustered together...

How attached we are to living!

The book is bearing heavy fruit.

Silent like the cellars

that were never opened

after the houses collapsed – my parents,

who had spent all their pasts

before I was born.

I drank their omissions.

And here with me are my daughters

facing the camera, my hands not merely

resting on their shoulders, but grasping –

gently, yet distinctly – as we incline

toward each other.

Note: Nachkriegszeit, literally after-war-time – in Germany the period following WWII.

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"Sorting Photos" was first published in Poetry Daily, Feb. 7, 2015. http://poems.com.

Leonore Hildebrandt is the author of The Work at Hand and The Next Unknown. She has published poems and translations in the Cafe Review, Cerise Press, the Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, The Fiddlehead, Poetry Daily, and Poetry Salzburg Review, among other journals. A native of Germany, Hildebrandt lives “off the grid” in Harrington, Maine. She teaches writing at the University of Maine and serves on the editorial board of the Beloit Poetry Journal.