The Swimmer

by William Miller

Up before dawn in a green bathing cap,

an old-fashioned swimsuit that showed

every bulge, her legs were almost elephantine.

We knew her story, all of us around the lake:

boxcars, iron gate, Zyklon-B gas from

a shower head that killed her mother

and sisters in less than five nightmare minutes.

The tattoo was still on her arm, the number

she was reduced to. Camp guards

and a staff officer pulled her aside

at the sound of allied bombers. One child

saved might look like compassion to GIs

who retched at the sight of stick people

behind barbed wire, the smell

of death they knew on battlefields

from Tunisia to the Rhine. Here,

on this lake shore, she was no longer a child

but someone else grown into a woman

who never missed the sunrise, slapped

the cold water with liver-spotted hands.

We woke up to her, all of us, her sounds

a disturbing call to question how we lived

our odd years, why, what without?

The lake shook, the hills around it seemed

to shake, and the sun she swam

so loudly beneath had wings that

were older than scripture—the first blood

spilled for spite—wings that healed.