Crystal Night: Berlin 1938
It is so still
she can hear the piano
next door;
someone is practicing
being alien.
In her bedroom
a large child
stares at a homemade dollhouse.
She frowns;
she moves figures around.
She takes away
the furniture in the living room
three times:
a pasted couch
and tables, empty spools.
There is nothing in the kitchen
but in the bathroom
a small plastic toilet
gives private delight.
The piano stops
stumbling. Its large silence
makes a vacancy,
if only someone
were warned.
But the child
is intent on her dollhouse
family, placing them
with thick steady fingers:
they do what she wants.
In their wallpaper nest
the mother and father
are rigid as little matchsticks:
mother slants back
against the sofa
and father in the armchair
also doesn't listen.
The puppet master child
can hardly breathe,
there is such fixed concentration
in the cutaway shoebox dollhouse.
Upstairs a toy baby flops
in a small pink bassinette
and the older sister feels ugly.
She lies on a floor
waiting to be used.
Outside it is wartime
or snow raging.
The winds are carrying.
whole countries, shattered glass,
away. But the child
moves furniture into place
and tacks down the curtains,
just so.
Now the pink baby is smacked
rather too hard,
the doll sister
shoved roughly onto her bed
while downstairs
mother and father, stiffly,
do not stir.
Night, masked, impassive,
peeps in the window
and the future,
that hit man,
takes his position in the shrubbery.
Structure
65 lines · 7 stanzas