Henrik

We were delighted when Dad told us
he had befriended a refugee
and was bringing him home for Christmas.

We couldn’t have been more pleased
if he’d promised us a marmoset—
as stranger-starved Aussies in 1949
we were intrigued by our first Pole.

So Henrik came to Christmas dinner
and we shyly regarded him—a man
handsome in the way of the Polish
with the look of an aristocrat
made temporarily poor.

Our Christmas heat bemused him
as did the silly game we played
over by the window to catch the breeze,
spinning the baby’s top—a houseful
of flushed and friendly innocents.

Henrik did not much smile, what he had lived
did not encourage amusement,
nor did our ignorance. Our parents
had sent six brothers away to war
and only three came back,
but what did we know, really.

Later on, a blonde nabbed Henrik,
and he left our ken, coming back
once only, with a baby that made him smile.

We never knew where he came from—
a palace, a slum or some devil’s camp,
but we know where he settled—
a one-storey suburb baking by the sea.

He died last month, it was in the paper,
he left a family, a house, a plot of ground
and a past beyond the imagining
of the happy islanders he fell among.