Pocketwatch
by Peter Schmitt
Kano, Nigeria, WWII
Useless now: glass crystal melted and lost,
numerals against the charred face ghostly,
hands stilled at impact, the once-fine Swiss Longines,
blackened yet unbroken only its long chain.
He had found it, the plane’s navigator,
in ashes still smoldering a day later,
where like newborn birds the crew kicked out the hatch,
fell to the earth, and ran with joy, the watch
slipping from his pocket, millions of minutes
yet waiting, marriage, children, a life, young man
one day my father. To whom will I will it,
childless? A watch that stopped, but how time didn’t.
Peter Schmitt is the author of six collections of poems, most recently Goodbye, Apostrophe, from Regal House. He has also edited and written an introduction for his late father's Pan Am Ferry Tales: A World War II Memoir (McFarland, 2022). The poems published in this issue were inspired by passages from that memoir.