DDCPoetry

  We start with exposition, "We were waiting for a train in the echoing underground. / I was thirteen. He was old, a family friend, a refugee from another century," Without knowing the context of the poem at first, I wondered why there was two of them on the train -- a young girl and a old family friend, until, "The Gestapo hammered at his front door with the order for his arrest" and now we're in a very specific time and a general area in Europe.  The  Gestapo is the secret police of Nazi Germany.  This brings to light some insight on the "refugee from another century" who "walked out the back door with nothing but his passport in his pocket." We return to the train station and the girl and the friend have a slight conversation: Just before our train thundered into the station, making it impossible to hear out of the blue, he said to me, memory is a paradise no one can expel you from. This morning, in another century, I woke up remembering.