Tea at the Berghof

       

    

Tea at the Berghof

 

We used to spend the spring evenings drinking tea

By the great fireplace on the ground floor,

Häelssen & Lyon I seem to recall.

 

From the thirty- metre window you could look out

At the vertiginous panorama of the Austrian Alps,

With Salzburg in the distance.

 

Titian’s Venus hung on a far wall,

While the finest Persian carpets lay beneath our feet.

We felt invulnerable up there,

 

The sales of Mein Kampf, which had been made

Compulsory reading, had seen to that.

It was all so far from the house of men,

It was all so far from the pits of Ypres.

The novelist Carmen Francesca Banciu was the Editor responsible 

for publishing this poem coming from my Heraclirean phase

some years ago now. I thought she was fearless a- as indeed an Editor must be.

See link for more poems in this cycle, taken from the collection The Gombeen ( unpublished)

http://levurelitteraire.com/peter-o-neill-3/