Ta-pum Ta-pum

  

Ta pum – Ta pum

Grandpa never talked about the war, neither did grandma. They both used to sing its songs, though. I realized, over time, that the atrocities of those days had lost the aura of horror and stopped striking fear into them. The attachment to melodies, that nostalgia, which actually excluded the memory of any effort and suffering, derived from a "limitation of life." In other words, among so many possibilities, for them, there hadn't been any other youth but that of the war period.

autumn evening -
one to another the edges 
of the wound 

 

Note: "Ta pum" is one of the best known songs of the Great War, born in the Italian trenches.

Published in Contemporary Haibun, April 2018, vol 14 no 1.