poetry PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE AS “LIBRARY AFTER AIR RAID, LONDON, 1940”

We've become inured to civilian bombing, collateral damage, refugees on the road--the consequences of warfare--but it wasn't always so. As poet Cintia Santana depicts the World War II bombing of a scholarly library, she leads us to "the shock of light."

Cintia Santana Beloit Poetry Journal
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PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE AS “LIBRARY AFTER AIR RAID, LONDON, 1940” 
By Cintia Santana

1.
Luck has left 
the tidy shelves of books intact

and a leaded window in the back:

each square divided into
smaller, beveled panes. Defy

they say. Survive, survive.

2.
Three men in bowler hats
stand before the shelves and browse.

As if oblivious to the ruins of the house,

the terrors of the night, they study spines,
reflect. Wear woolen overcoats amidst the char.

A timber holds the standing walls apart.

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3.
Under rubble, a ladder and a covered chair, crushed.
The archive, leather-bound and made to last.

What once was roof reveals the vastness
of the sky. Inside becomes outside

and everywhere the shock of light.

Cintia Santana teaches poetry and fiction workshops in Spanish, and literary translation courses at Stanford University. She is the author of Forth and Back: Translation, Dirty Realism, and the Spanish Novel (1985-2000). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, RHINO, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. Her poem, “Qasida of Grief,” was selected as the winner of the Sycamore Review’s 2013 Wabash Prize by C.D. Wright.