Operation Gomorrah
The name of the mission when US and British forces bombed Hamburg, Germany near the end of World War II.
I
The practice of Germans:
bombing civilians
in Barcelona,
Warsaw, Belgrade,
Rotterdam, and London.
They played with them.
Hitler at dinner
made a prophecy:
Goering will light fires
over London,
incendiary bombs
of a new kind.
He will start fires,
thousands of fires.
II
Hamburg, July, 1943
Four-thousand-pound bombs,
tore windows and doors,
ignited attics.
Thirty-pound firebombs
sought the low rooms,
the firestorm perfected,
the ancient port city,
the gates to Hell.
A column of wind
howled like a hurricane,
resonated
the summer sky
like a great organ,
a ram against heaven.
A sea of flame
melted the streets.
People reached down
to free their feet.
There they stayed
on all fours screaming.
Allied pilots
felt heat in their planes.
Sugar boiled
in bakery cellars.
Blue flames
licked like tongues
at charred corpses,
some brown, some purple.
Some lay doubled
in their own pools of fat.
III
We were sent from the camps
to clear the rubble.
We found people at tables
overcome by gas.
Bodies had cooked
from bursting boilers.
Whole families fit
in a single basket.
IV
How much rubble
should each German have?
In Cologne:
31 cubic metres -
in Dresden for each:
42.8.
Enemy civilians:
raze a factory,
waste the workers,
families, homes.
"Dehousing" the enemy
Lindemann called it.
V
Exodus
More than a million
began leaving Hamburg.
In Upper Bavaria
a group tried to force
itself onto a train.
A cardboard suitcase
burst open
on the platform with toys,
a manicure case,
singed underwear.
The charred corpse
of a child fell out.
If you looked from the train
you were a foreigner.
VI
Winter, Sonthofen, 1945
Music students
abrade their bows
on stringed instruments
in the annex to
the railway station,
one of two places
bombed in the village.
In the one lighted room
of the bombed-out building
they look as if
they are on a raft
that drifts into darkness
like the self that is silenced.
