They had no where to come from.
All their places now, erased.
Tank track, boot beaten,
crushed country roads and boulevards.
Smoking hulks of cities,
bombed to brick bulks.
Small villages where life lived well
until death found the farms
and harvested them with flames.

Now the world waited for some hope of
no,
not peace.
War lessness would be enough.
A momentary quietus,
a few years.
God, please! A decade?
A brief cease to take
gulps of unfiltered flesh flaked,
black smoked, brick dusted, cordite
air.
Just enough time to revive
and then to fire up the mechanisms,
get them grinding again!

But,
no.
Not all.
Some fled from no where to there,
to that park on the shore of
Long Island Sound,
on the north east corner of the Bronx,
where, as only in the New York City
I knew at 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,
where this really could happen.

Wandering expatriates,
Poles, Estonians, Latvians,
Greeks, Slavs, Russians,
French, Dutch,
some surviving Vets:
a German-American Marine,
home from Iwo Jima;
a Brooklyn Irishman,
honorably discharged
with a Purple Heart
and a Bronze Star from Bastogne;
my atheist Jewish Father,
a sonar man from North Atlantic
U-Boat hunts…
Not all immigrants, but all escapees,
the tattooed numbers not on their wrists,
rather scorching their hearts,
came on weekends to drink, play chess
and
no,
not play,
rather battle with each other
on a hard packed dirt volley ball court
surrounded by this wooded park called
Hunters Island.
They gathered there,
gravitated by their heavy hope to,
no,
not remember,
rather build new memory
to fill the gaping hole
blown open by a war begun
a decade before my 1948 birth,
to create new life worth remembering
after a holocaust of death,
to spike the second hit set,
instead of bombs,
into this American earth,
crying Victory.