The Pub

Monument

Meredith Moench

there’s one on the hill
above my house
from the Great War —

where the German teens left
empty beer bottles,
broken brown glass
in wet earth.

The Kandern citizens thought
it was us —
the “Amis” —
who must have dishonored
their patch of field and wood.

A small, earthy patch,
a hooded place
with cow pasture hills behind.
Thick trees at the summit —
three pillars
on a wall
of stone.

Dangling our legs,
some days standing
on the Monument,
we steady ourselves with our hands —
watching the valley orange-over
in the evening.

Across the valley,
Schloss Bürgeln.
The renaissance castle where Paul
played as a boy
when his father was the renovations architect.

Inside, the chapel
where Paul and Ruth were married —
the wife who bore him no children
to continue the family farm.
But Paul said, “we’ll buy
a house in town and
I’ll plot out
every centimeter of the earth
and our cabbages will still grow.”

Sausenburg on the next hill,
the ruins of a medieval castle
with one tower still standing,
from it a boy
threw himself.
A white cross at the base
of the stone spiral steps,
Martin.

Higher than both spires —
Hoch Blauen, the radio tower.

Perhaps we do dishonor:
not knowing how
the stones went up,
how the names were chiseled
with tears and hands
as heavy as the stones —

a fortress for broken bodies.