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Being Frank with Anne
By Phyllis Johnson © 2007
Yellow stars in heavy rain;
door of gray to a new endeavor,
colored by hopes time and again
the Secret Annexe
wouldn’t be forever.
Chiming clock,
faithful,
feassuring.
A celebrity collage
applied with paste
serves to glue your
sanity in place.
Burnt peas in
anxiety soup.
Strips for curtains
and stripes of sunlight.
Oppression-
no coughs
and no exits in sight.
A card index
for books,
a memory index
for life on the outside.
Now inside,
in a house just sold,
your secret threatened
like your share of butter.
The future is not so
sweet and smooth as the
butter you crave on your plate.
A kind of hodge podge vegetable soup.
each having his or her own colors and tastes.
Each complementing the other,
they blend in this sink or swim lifestyle.
Each bobbing for air or attention
and a fair share.
Some settlers, some stirrers, some sinkers.
*
Fights over rations
drown out rumbling tummies.
There’s a sourness
over Mummy’s birthday sugar.
Jealousy reared green
and ugly.
Your own disappointment
grows like ivy on a trellis.
Peter’s cat, Boche,
has spent his ninth life.
Perhaps a meal
or a fur hat.
Your pantry
has spent its best.
Now it’s boiled lettuce
or rotten potatoes.
Your lifestyle
has spent its normalcy.
Now it’s confinement
and desperation
to find humor
in dangerous situations.
*
This is an excerpt from Being Frank with Anne, a book of approx 180 pages of poems in chronological dates corresponding to the diary. This excerpt is with permission of the author,
Phyllis Johnson, published by Community Press
* * * * *
For more Poems, see our Poetry Archives
~~~~~~~
from the January 2008 Edition of the Jewish Magazine
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