"My Father with Cigarette Twelve Years Before the Nazis Could Break His Heart" (poem) by Philip Levine

I remember the room in which he held 

a kitchen match and with his thumbnail 

commanded it to flame: a brown sofa, 

two easy chairs, one covered with flowers, 

a black piano no one ever played half 

covered by a long-fringed ornamental scarf 

Ray Estrada brought back from Mexico 

in 1931. How new the world is, you say. 

In that room someone is speaking about money, 

asking why it matters, and my father exhales 

the blue smoke, and says a million dollars 

even in large bills would be impossible. 

He's telling me because, I see now, I'm 

the one who asked, for I dream of money, 

always coins and bills that run through my hands, 

money I find in the corners of unknown rooms 

or in metal boxes I dig up in the backyard 

flower beds of houses I've never seen. 

My father rises now and goes to the closet. 

It's as though someone were directing a play 

and my father's part called for him to stand 

so that the audience, which must be you, 

could see him in white shirt, dark trousers, 

held up by suspenders, a sign of the times, 

and conclude he is taller than his son 

will ever be, and as he dips into his jacket, 

you'll know his role calls for him to exit 

by the front door, leaving something 

unfinished, the closet light still on, 

the cigarette still burning dangerously, 

a Yiddish paper folded to the right place 

so that a photograph of Hindenburg 

in full military regalia swims up 

to you out of all the details we lived. 

I remember the way the match flared 

blue and yellow in the deepening light 

of a cool afternoon in early September, 

and the sound, part iron, part animal, 

part music, as the air rushed toward it 

out of my mouth, and his intake of breath 

through the Lucky Strike, and the smoke 

hanging on after the door closed and the play 

ran out of acts and actors, and the audience -- 

which must be you -- grew tired of these lives 

that finally came to nothing or no more 

than the furniture and the cotton drapes 

left open so the darkening sky can seem 

to have the last word, with half a moon 

and a showering of fake stars to say what 

the stars always say about the ordinary. 

Oh, you're still here, 60 years later, 

you wonder what became of us, why 

someone put it in a book, and left 

the book open to a page no one reads. 

Everything tells you he never came back, 

though he did before he didn't, everything 

suggests it was the year Hitler came 

to power, the year my grandmother learned 

to read English novels and fell in love 

with David Copperfield and Oliver Twist

which she read to me seated on a stool 

beside my bed until I fell asleep. 

Everything tells you this is a preface 

to something important, the Second World War, 

the news that leaked back from Poland 

that the villages were gone. The truth is -- 

if there is a truth -- I remember the room, 

I remember the flame, the blue smoke, 

how bright and slippery were the secret coins, 

how David Copperfield doubted his own name, 

how sweet the stars seemed, peeping and blinking, 

how close the moon, how utterly silent the piano. 

-- from The Simple Truth