The Dam Square Massacre May 5th, 1945
In this new land, I sit with my mother
in whispers, she tells me her story
of the Dam Square, of Amsterdam
where she, a child, small and excited
had snuck out to dance to the end of the war
to patriotic songs of the Netherlands
cranked out from a blue barrel organ.
But machine guns were trained on those revellers
and as the gunfire began, they took flight
from the monstrous rattle of stammering guns
as bullets ripped through them like butter
the blood-splashed ran screaming
like shrill birds fleeing,
that mad and bewildering slaughter.
My mother ran
a solitary girl
she ran straight past
the adults hunkered down
behind trucks and
the barrel organ
she ran past a woman,
her arm shot off
she ran and ran
past long columns
in the lee of the
skinny lamp posts.
She ran past a young boy
lying motionless
on cobble-stones.
She ran past a pram –
still and abandoned, with
a slanting glance of terror,
was there a baby?
But she kept running
flying like a sparrow bird,
fleeing predatory hawks
through the narrow
stone streets
to her home.
Today, years later
under cliffs cascading to the sea
she cries her grief for that pram
as seagulls cry out above.
Seventy years haunted
‘Was there a baby?’
Should she have stopped?
‘I never forgot it’, she says.
(Published, The Dam Square Massacre May 5th, 1945 (Four W Thirty-four, New Writing, 2023
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