Remembering Dresden

Fearing a lack of oxygen
   a navigator on a Lancaster bomber
in a night sky over a blackened and flattened city
The firebombing of Dresden, 13 February 1944

backwards
counting

one

slicing time
everything changes
and everything

remains the same

wars thread together families
relatives and future relatives
try to kill each other

remembering Dresden

a navigator on a Lancaster bomber
in a night sky over a blackened and flattened city
the firebombing of Dresden, 13 February 1944

there is no statute of limitations
on endless memory
no limits of time
to the application of late night atrocity

a war hero
hanged
     on a wire
strung up
  on meat hooks

doing what is right
    the logic of the next step



There is no statute of limitations
on endless memory
no limits of time
to the application
of late night atrocity

two

growing up, lopsided
obsessed by a war
a father, too young,
hauled back from recruiting booths

more uncles than I could count
decorated, and honoured in spades
serious in black and white photographs
        written up in faded newspaper articles

hunkered down, in darkrooms
   of thin student newspapers
back from moratoriums,
rallies, banners and speeches
  a rush of words through a megaphone

obsessed in a different way by another war

of wars
and survivors of wars
who sidestepped death from bullets
for the sudden halt of strokes

three

what keeps us apart
brings us together

our families
between them
  have seen
too many wars

in the sudden flash of a bombsight
the emptied load
through a bomb bay door
there are old cities
there are moments closed forever

there is forever nothing

four

moments fall away
without fresh memory

repeat

predicting history
backwards
always risky
     often doomed

words reverse

a war hero becomes a criminal
an insurgent equals a terrorist
a war crime represents
an act of freedom

everything changes
and everything
remains the same

in need of a navigator
to chart
these troubled words

everything changes
and everything
remains the same

© Stephen Cassidy, 2004

This text was the basis of the animation Remembering Dresden, shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize New Media Award in 2004. The animation was one of a series produced from 2004-2009 created in Flash software, as part of experimental work with moving images, sound and text. However, with the publisher withdrawing support for this software, it is now difficult to play the animations.

The simplest way to play them is to use replacement software Ruffle, which is open source software which emulates Flash. Visit my website http://people.myplace.net.au/~sccp/, then from the list displayed, right click on the animation you wish to play, in this case ‘Remembering Dresden.swf’, and save it to your own device. Then open the Ruffle demo file, https://ruffle.rs/demo/ and find the downloaded animation on your device and it will play.

See also the 'Remembering Dresden' article.

For more information about the author see Writing biography.

See also

I smoke baby cigars
‘Smoking baby cigars in the dark of the backyard. Like some Cuban presidente haranguing the crowd with reminders, I proffer a list of romantic anniversaries, our May 4th movement, our July 12th uprising – our moment when everything became new’, I smoke baby cigars.

Cut back to black
‘Cut back to black, thin chill drizzle mid-winter – infinite regression on petrol’. Also called ‘Revhead heaven’, Cut back to black.

Coming back to these stones
‘Coming back to these stones – in the sandy dry reaches of the Coorong in South Australia’s South East birds flicker across the flat water like beads of run-away mercury’, Coming back to these stones.

Landscapes in a rear vision mirror
‘Heading at a moment's notice into Broken Hill, breaking several traffic laws on the Barrier Highway, in the rear vision mirror the land kept switching colours’, Landscapes in a rear vision mirror.

Stopping by Lake George
‘Lake George is a vast stretching freshwater lake, with no outlet. It is only diminished by evaporation. Many stories are told about Lake George, a still point of the turning earth, with all the quiet of the eye at the centre of a hurricane’, Stopping by Lake George.See other work from the Conversations group exhibition, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, 2004 – a collaborative exhibition of writers and visual artists.

State of origin
Multimedia piece developed with visual artist, Deborah Faeyrglenn, State of origin looked at where we come from, where we go next and where we truly belong. In this work the writer and visual artist combined word, image and computer technology to make visual music. Words and images moved across the computer screen, with no fixed address, State of origin.

The lost art of conversation
Installation, developed with visual artist, Deborah Faeyrglenn, on words, meaning, reflection and infinite (or at least, partial) regression. Three tall thin vertical mirrors stand against the wall, covered in bursts of words. Three matching paper shadows flow out from the wall along the floor. Words on the mirrors flutter and blur into shadows, The lost art of conversation.

balloon
A fictional narrative work in the form of a website, the website as writing. About the adventures of a refugee from the big city who sets up the High Country Thought Balloon Company. A series of brief vignettes about the characters, situations and stories which intersect the path of the balloons as they soar across the skies of the Southern Tablelands and Snowy region. It is about changing perspective, balloon.

Malacoota Inlet
‘Shutdown in a flat, wet land, the line beween sea and sky where grey meets grey, where stricken yachts come in’, Malacoota Inlet.

Sitting on twigs
‘Sitting on twigs in the flat lands, in a piece of country loaded with meaning, like a tightly coiled spring’, Sitting on twigs.

Signature of water
A series of artworks as part of the Waterworks exhibition at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery responding to the shared task of facing up to life on our dry continent. It ranged from short, minimalist animations, using cartoons, to hyperfiction drawing on the styles of crime novels. It was a mix of poetry, storytelling, images and sounds which were heavily influenced by the styles of popular culture and the urban and rural landscapes around us, Signature of water.