In This Time of War,

I’ve rummaged too long in my dresser drawers sniffing
at dead sachets.  Even the rose petals are scraps

of paper with no names written down.  So how
must I dress myself to walk about upon

this reddened earth?  Today I will wear my snazzy
new panties of snake skin, those cool translucent scales

that slither in only one direction, up.
Never to droop or gather about my ankles.

I once knew a woman who lived through the London Blitz,
and her knickers were stitched from German parachute silk—

all the elastic had gone to the army, only
a safety pin to hold her homemade panties

up; she stood on the platform at Waterloo Station
where a long troop train chugged in with the wounded,

and just as her right hand ascended to her forehead
in quick salute, her slippery silk panties descended

and puddled over her sensible shoes, and she stepped
right out of them and kept on walking,

leaving all that tender and airworthy silk
under the crooked and shell-shocked wheels

of the gurneys, many,
so many gurneys.


—Penelope Scambly Schott