Hide and Seek by Fiona Benson

*This poem really affected me when I read it.

After her swim I wrap my child warm
and take her to the changing room
and lay her down to dry. She holds the corners
of the towel up over her face
like a soft, turquoise tent and yells
‘Hide and seek! Hide and seek!’
I life an edge and shout ‘Boo!’
and she shrieks with laughter -
I can feel the heat rising from her body
and smell the chlorine - she hides again,
and again. I peek under and she’s beside herself
with happiness - she’s at an age where she thinks
that if she just stands still in the middle of the lawn
I will not see her, that somehow she is gone -
but always, in the pockets behind this game,
there is this residue, this constriction,
families squeezed behind false walls
or hidden under the floor. I think of the soldier
sensing the hollow under his sole
and prying up the board on all those cramped
and flinching humans; but mostly I think
of the mothers, their hearts jumping out of their mouths
trying to shush their children - my first-born now,
who’s never been able to do as she’s told,
how she’d have writhed and screamed and bitten like a cat
if I’d tried to hold her quiet, how I’d have hurt her,
clamping her mouth, trying to keep her still.
The trapdoor is always opening, the women and children
are herded into the yard - and I ask myself if,
when my daughters were pulled from me,
I would fight and scream to keep them,
or let them go gently, know
there was nothing to be done?
If we were pushed into the showers
would I pretend it was only time to get them clean?
We are not meant to write of the Sho’ah,
we who were not there, but on bad days it’s all I can think of,
the mothers trying to shield their children with their bodies
under the showers, screaming for mercy, begging for rain.
And it’s never over - here are the children
riding to the border in fridges as the air becomes hot and thin,
their tiny bodies glowing like bright sardines
on the customs officer’s hand-held scan;
and here is the tribesman carrying your husband’s genitals
and a bloody machete, and you are a mother
running for your life with a baby tied to you back
and two children by the hand
but one small son is falling behind;
Jesus fucking Christ, I don’t know who
I’m teaching you to hide from, but look
how eagerly you learn.