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Contests : War Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2004 : S.W. Rickett
OPERATION GOMORRAH
The name of the mission when US and British forces
bombed Hamburg, Germany near the end of World War II.
I
The practice of Germans:
bombing civilians
in Barcelona,
Warsaw, Belgrade,
Rotterdam, and London.
They played with them.
Hitler at dinner
made a prophecy:
Göerring will light fires
over London,
incendiary bombs
of a new kind.
He will start fires,
thousands of fires.
II
Hamburg, July, 1943
Four-thousand-pound bombs,
tore windows and doors,
ignited attics.
Thirty-pound firebombs
sought the low rooms,
the firestorm perfected,
the ancient port city,
the gates to Hell.
A column of wind
howled like a hurricane,
resonated
the summer sky
like a great organ,
a ram against heaven.
A sea of flame
melted the streets.
People reached down
to free their feet.
There they stayed
on all fours screaming.
Allied pilots
felt heat in their planes.
Sugar boiled
in bakery cellars.
Blue flames
licked like tongues
at charred corpses,
some brown, some purple.
Some lay doubled
in their own pools of fat.
III
We were sent from the camps
to clear the rubble.
We found people at tables
overcome by gas.
Bodies had cooked
from bursting boilers.
Whole families fit
in a single basket.
IV
How much rubble
should each German have?
In Cologne:
31 cubic metres -
in Dresden for each:
42.8.
Enemy civilians:
raze a factory,
waste the workers,
families, homes.
"Dehousing" the enemy
Lindemann called it.
V
Exodus
More than a million
began leaving Hamburg.
In Upper Bavaria
a group tried to force
itself onto a train.
A cardboard suitcase
burst open
on the platform with toys,
a manicure case,
singed underwear.
The charred corpse
of a child fell out.
If you looked from the train
you were a foreigner.
VI
Winter, Sonthofen, 1945
Music students
abrade their bows
on stringed instruments
in the annex to
the railway station,
one of two places
bombed in the village.
In the one lighted room
of the bombed-out building
they look as if
they are on a raft
that drifts into darkness
like the self that is silenced.
This poem won an Honorable Mention in the 2004 War Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers. Author S.W. Rickett received a $50 award. Copyright is reserved to the author.
About S.W. Rickett
S.W. Rickett holds an M.A. from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Education, Reading, and an M.A.,
English-Creative Writing, Poetry. Poems have appeared in New Letters, Nimrod, Chouteau Review, Number One Magazine,
The Kansas City Star, Switched-on Gutenberg, Smartish Pace, The Same, and most recently, Antietam Review.
She received a fellowship from Colgate University in 1999, and a fellowship from the Women's Center for Graduate Studies,
the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 2002. In 2003 she traveled to Norway and Germany to meet with the
adult children of former Nazis and to write a book of poems on the subject.
She is semi-retired and an adjunct professor at Park University in Parkville, Missouri.
She lives by a lake with her husband, Charles, and Lottie the cat.
About "Operation Gomorrah", Ms. Rickett writes, "This poem is in the form of a 'curse', which means in phrases.
The pattern originates from liturgical verse. Each stich is broken by a caesura. This form is also called a malison.
The stichs are split by a caesura into hemstichs. Lindemann was Churchill's controversial advisor.
On March 30, 1942, Lindemann speculated that if 58 German cities, each with populations over 100,000, were bombed,
that one-third of Germany's population 'would be turned out of house and home,'
thus his euphemism 'dehousing' the enemy seemed about as serious as 'delousing' the enemy."
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