Between Home and Abroad

poems by
John N. Miller

ISBN 13: 978-1-59948-176-0
~40 pages, $10

* * * Selected for publication as a result of finishing as a finalist in the
2008 MSR CHAPBOOK CONTEST * * *

Projected release date: April 14, 2009

 

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About the Author / Comments / Sample

 

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About the Author

 

John N. Miller was born in Ohio (1933) and grew up in Hawai'i (1937-1951). After earning his undergraduate degree at Denison University, he worked under Yvor Winters at Stanford. Returning to Denison, he taught literature and creative writing until his retirement in 1997. He now lives with his German-born wife Ilse in a retirement community in Lexington, Virginia. He's been published in a wide variety of literary journals over the past five decades. His recent books include Second War in Hawai'i (March Street Press) and In and Out of Their Elements (Fine Tooth Press, 2006). Throughout his career he has been helped by his Freshman English teacher, mentor, colleague and friend, Paul L. Bennett. Besides writing, Miller enjoys biking, swimming, fishing, gardening, and travel, especially to Hawai'i, Germany, and nearby European countries. His longest stay in Germany occurred in 1990-1991 when he was a Fulbright lecturer at the Heinrich Heine University in Duesseldorf.

 

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Comments

 

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Samples

 

A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC

 

Silent night, stille Nacht,
our neighbors' porch light burns late
as she lingers at a hospice
with her dying husband.

Halb-dunkle Nacht, night of a waning moon.
The black cat Tristan prowls
under an upstairs square of light,
that of his widowed owner, trying
to read herself to sleep.

December-lengthened night.
Mist-gauzed streetlights lend a soft glow
to the quiet. On our death-
shrunken side street, there's still room
for tenderness and mercy.

Silent night, eine kleine Nachtmusik.
Through our windows, before bedtime,
we'd see our German-speaking friend
at his Klavier, his transitory stay
against those dark wings of the angel

feathering the night like deep-dyed snow,
oh night of stars lying dead beyond their light,
night of our neighbor's silenced music
haunting as a ghost of song.

 

BALLAD OF THE WOUNDED SOLDIER
--Warsaw Ghetto, 1941

 

At the last hour of the day,
children, ghosts of the doomed city,
emerge from basements, alleys, doorways,
hoping to awaken pity

in the few stolid passers-by.
They stand by lampposts and by walls
of rubbled buildings, whimpering
in hunger. The more musical

among them sing, in voices thin
as their pale flesh, a ballad known
through all of Poland: after battle
a wounded soldier, left alone,

cries out "Mother" as he dies.
But far away and unaware
her son in mortal need has called,
she cannot answer.

Only the earth, the battleground
where his last moments pass,
rocks him into an eternal sleep
with rustling trees and grass.

Beggar children, balladeers,
where are your mothers? Must they lie asleep
beneath the rubble and not keep you
off the streets?

(from Wladyslaw Szpilman's The Pianist)

 

IN A GERMAN GRAVEYARD
--Freiburg, 1985

 

What ghosts should I, a foreigner, evoke
from these neat graves? Though ranks and titles,
birth and death dates of their occupants
appear on tombstones, all are sealed away
under the blank gaze of pure marble angels
or the simple weight of earth--

nothing to haunt the names and rotted remnants
of those lying below. If saying it with flowers
is the rule, the flowers here
say innocence, say beauty in profusion,
short-lived, unhistorical,
a horticultural aesthetic.

The rough-hewn crosses fringed with marigolds
tell nothing of the soldiers underneath--
elite storm troopers, true believers
in the Nazi cause, or unlearned farmboys?
A local habitant might know

whether gravestone panegyrics shroud
death-camp officialdom or dissidence,
but I, a foreigner, know nothing
of the lives that antedate the crafted
lettering above them.

What ghosts survive the ordered monuments?
The trimly gardened plots? The settlement
of mortal residue in its deep
cemetery hush? Friedhof . . .
meaning "peace yard."

Should I, unknowing, view it as a small
cosmetic surface-piece of German soil,
or assume its dead are buried
with their national past
and, lidded tight within their coffins,

are due the last rites of forgiveness?