Keep Moving from Wild Acre by Trish Bruxvoort Colligan

6. Keep Moving
For Marianne, wise and brave.

It is a myth that if you're young
your life will not pass before your eyes.
Night shells, spot on;
I swear we were all but gone.

Family of five, women and girls are we:
Tanta, Oma and Mutti, baby Gabriella, and me.
Our papa got caught in the fury,
he's fighting, off fighting,
and Opa lay under the snow,
so we hitched our lives to this cart.
A fleeing frenzy,
toward the West we must go.

January
Minus 20
East Prussia, 1945
Only one way to survive:
Keep moving.

I have heard them talking
when they think I am asleep,
horrors committed by soldiers
against us refugees.
We're running out of options,
the Red Army above and behind
chasing us off the end of the world
and onto the cold and brittle ice.
What will be our fate tonight?
Keep moving.

Mine are the only feet
still able to make this passage
across this frozen highway of this
midnight Baltic Sea.
So, reins in my hand,
leading this horse and cart with my family in tow,
ankles two feet down in water
feeling for bomb craters in the ice below.

Fathers failing.
Babies broken.
Mothers mourning.
Will you eat us all alive?
Keep moving.

Hold on, Love…
I am holding
together
what alone can not
bridge
this divide.

By what grace do we stand?
Three women and and one child.

Music and lyrics by Trish Bruxvoort Colligan © 2013 River's Voice Music, ASCAP

• Folk
• americana
• country folk
• fusion
• roots
• storytelling
• Strawberry Point