Thursday 8 March 2018

Norway poems: Hammerfest 1945


Hammerfest 1945
Pictures in the museum bring back

its past: destruction and reconstruction 
in waves. Bombed; pretty again and then
Burnt to the ground: 
A German swan song
To their losing war.

Architects huddled in huts to rebuild,
start life again amongst the stony shapes
left on the ground, of past living, loving.
Rubble is reworked,
The town reinvented,
Church towers rise up:
Defiance of spirit will overcome evil.


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