D Day: The Drop by Mary Duggan

The Drop

The lamplight gauzed in the swelling smog
Of that bad November air

Swallowed by this mist
The Civil Defence volunteers
Chatted about the Blitz

and Herman Goering’s comment,
“ Let them drop on London”
As they stood at their posts

on the corner of Peartree
and Willow Road while the residents looked to sleep

A counting parachute
plummeted, with only twenty-five seconds to touch down

From the German F11 flight
Which stole into the Enfield night, with now, only ten seconds

before that ingenious masterpiece –
A forty mile-an-hour ticking whirl-i-gig hit the ground

Around ten O’clock.
This magnificent masterpiece
Landed its landmine

Let rip the 153 pounder
A pressurised, hydrostatic
Incendiary

Against all war conventions
Which created a desecrating crater

On the Jewish doctor’s home.
Killed three wardens
on the very spot

where the tree shades
The redwood bench which marks this loss

at the corner of Peartree and Enfield’s Willow Road –
And what of the refugee Jewish
Family ?

Thinking themselves safe
from the Nazi state, located
by that landmine

Above the Enfield air space,
At the corner of Peartree, and Willow Road…

© Mary T Duggan