The Yielding Earth
by Mary Rose Betten | Listen

In the summer of 1944 ten year old Anec Lussier sees
her first American G.I.
She never tells her mother.
German tanks desecrate their garden.
Her father - away in battle - only she and her mother
see German tanks thunder through their garden
spattering shallots like Easter eggs.

Kestrels and swallows are silenced
Gunfire rips white paint from bedroom windows.
Twelfth century farmhouse walls cannot stifle
the roar of grinding tanks.
Mother teaches her - freeze - to approaching tanks.

Newspaper pictures of G.I.'s pale to flesh encounter.
Anec lifts the checkered kitchen curtain.
He bolts into view, face smeared, was it dirt?
He sees the garden, smiles at scallions, melons, baby carrots
Leaps like a stag toward their freshness.

Firecrackers snap, cushioned by vegetables he falls, arms wide hugging earth.
Tanks. Roaring tanks. She remembers to freeze.
Three tanks, one roaring after the other bury him.
Only tracks mark where his arms enveloped earth , bury his smile.
The man who flew like honeybee to blossom lies with the vegetables.

Fifty years later Anec's villagers summon her return,
a memorial to the G.I.'s remains. An old farmer came upon his helmet,
later dog tags - made a tombstone in the bone yard once their garden.

She will take her Manhattan grand daughter with her to the memorial
Anec wants the little girl to know how the earth comforted the GI,
how she loves the smell of the earth of her youth, and most of all
that the G.I. smiled before the earth pulled him to her great breast.