I thought some of you would like to see this poem I wrote after visiting The War Museum at Oslo. It was published by Finishing Line Press, a small press that publishes only chapbooks by women. They do a beautiful job. This one has sparkly endpapers and a satin ribbon book mark as part of the presentation. "Tracings" (www.budurl.com/carolynstracings) won a Military Writers' Society Silver medal. 

The War Museum at Oslo

Raindrops surf my windshield, slip across my reflection,

tears not fettered by gravity. I look into my father’s face,

decades gone, rather than my own. Years later I search for family

seeds.Norway’s fjords shed salty droplets

on faces like my father’s. Round faces. Eyes dilute-blue

like the pale skies above them. Men who fought

as Churchill’s voice crackled through smuggled vacuum

tubes. Here miniature battles, cotton snow, charcoal

clouds, tiny lead replicas of soldiers now gone,

desperate photo-faces of the condemned. Only days before I reached this spur,

I saw my grandson off to war, alone. A sacrifice.

A trade. For my father who never marched. Travis’ face

flat, pasted behind a window, an upside down smiley

pattern behind windows tinted khaki, his bus taking

him away from me. I leave the dark halls, history

encased, to sit outside fortress walls, put my head

between my knees. Gasp for comfort. Fragile. A portrait

on my bureau at home. Acidglass shores up the image

murlled by time. My father, stands in sepia snow,

round face, eyes look beyond the frame at me. He wouldn’t know

these boys his age, his blood, resisting Hitler’s hand

raised, his arms against them. Oceans, bodies of land

between my father and these others. Here a disconnect,

a link I cannot touch or breathe. Once I was a child

who did not have to say goodbye, now a grandmother

who must pay the price. My grandson. Heads for heat

and oil and sand. He, too, resists. He, however,

unsure, doesn’t know quite why or who or what.

This Nordic rain does not, cannot wash

the memory or the present clean or clear.