When he was eight years old my father survived the massive Allied bombings in Berlin during WWII. He recalled incessant explosions, running for cover into underground metro stations, and re-emerging to entire city blocks reduced to rubble. He and his family then suffered severe physical assaults from Russians who invaded and occupied the eastern part of the city. These traumas cast long shadows. This poem is my attempt to pay homage to his story. 

Gabrielle Langley is the author of Fairy Tale (Sable Books, 2023) and Azaleas on Fire (Sable Books, 2019). She has won the Lorene Pouncey Poetry Award and the Vivian Nellis Memorial Award for Creative Writing. She has been Houston Poetry Fest's Featured Poet, a national ARTlines finalist, a Black Fox Literary finalist, and a recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations. Ms. Langley was also a spearhead and co-editor for the anthology Red Sky: Poetry on the global epidemic of violence against women (Sable Books, 2016).

W: www.gabriellelangley.com

Judge Alison Tanik’s Comments:
This was another poem which i returned to time and time again, and one which offers so much up to the reader. The poet succeeds in addressing history and trauma through the lens of a camera and also, ultimately, through social media, making the reader a twice-removed witness to horror. The distance thus created beautifully echoes the chronoligical distance between the actual events and the present day by throwing a veil over them, as it were. To add to this feeling of disassociation, the poet approaches the ultimately terrifying subject revealed at the end of the poem through a series of beautiful tableau (the Brandenburg Gate, the swans, the spire of a church) as well as through a well-loved fairy tale. All of these superbly thought out devices create distance (emotional, chronological, and geographical) throughout the poem rendering the drunken waltz (which forms the pinnacle of the story) extremely moving. In the final few lines, the poet then skilfully wraps the reader once more  in a blanket of nostalgia. Brilliant story-telling.