Skeletons

My dad was in Berlin in 1946

and his old friend David

said that a friend of his was

at the Berlin Natural History Museum.

David wondered if he was still there.

At the time

Berlin was under a foot of snow,

the roads were covered with snow,

there was scarcely anything going along them.

You could scarcely see where the roads went.

My dad says he walked for hours

through heaps of bomb rubble and snow

round huge craters in the ground

under walls leaning over.

Snow everywhere.

Till suddenly, he came face to face with

some enormous skeletons in the snow.

The old Berlin Natural History Museum

had been hit by a bomb.

There were dinosaur skeletons

standing there in the middle of nowhere.

Great bones and skulls

rising up out of the snow

amongst heaps of broken brick

and broken glass.

“I’ll never forget the sight

of those dinosaur skeletons,”

my dad said.

I’ve never forgotten them either –

though I never saw them.

© Michael Rosen, from On the Move: Poems About Migration, Walker, 2020