1943
The alley out his window—
laundry on sagging lines
broken glass
a bicycle tire—
led to a narrow street
sometimes lit across from which
a courtyard more like
a dank box fed into
another alley that ran
straight into darkness
In the room he shared
with his brother
far from the university
working with a slide rule
protractor and graph paper
the Fourth Edition
of the Mechanical Engineers’ Handbook
by Lionel S. Marks
open before him
this was the slice of the world
my father gazed at from his desk
and hoped to escape
a place even the pigeons avoided
while that same winter his brother
drafted out of high school
rifle held chest-high
waded through rough surf
to a sunny beach in Sicily
Copyright © 2025 by Nicholas Christopher. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 13, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘1943’ is a poem about my father and his younger brother and their respective experiences in the year 1943, at the height of the Second World War. My father was an engineering student about to graduate from college. My uncle was an infantryman in the U.S. Army, fighting the Nazis in Europe. He was in the D-Day invasion and was the only member of his platoon to survive the landing at Omaha Beach. My father went on to earn a graduate degree while participating in the war effort, working for the War Department with a group of fellow engineers. Nineteen forty-three was a defining moment in both their lives. The poem speaks for itself better than I can in speaking around it.”
—Nicholas Christopher
Nicholas Christopher
Nicholas Christopher is the author of six novels and nine books of poetry, including On Jupiter Place (Counterpoint, 2016) and Crossing the Equator: New and Selected Poems, 1972–2004 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007). He is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, and the Poetry Society of America. Christopher lives in New York City.