Jen Haefeli Distant Lands Are Closer Than They Appear, 2025

Description

I learned several years ago that my grandfather fought in the first wave with fellow infantry soldiers who came ashore in Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944. He never spoke of the day, and rarely spoke of the experiences of wartime. As his granddaughter, I never would have known. His children did not know the details until after his death. He was an American soldier who survived that day to go on and fall in love with a young English woman who had been sleeping in the sewers of London to survive the bombings. The focus of this collection is on holding the moments of time that disappear quickly. The rolling of the waves. The sun shines intensely on the water as it mixes on the shoreline, and returns to roll back out into the vast pool off the ocean, where it will float and hold vessels. Where large orcas and small jellyfish will gently swim along the currents that once tossed violently, and now gently flow. The once crimson tides that held the men who did not make it to the beaches, filled with fervor and battle forth, have rinsed clean. They have been bleached, and the hemoglobin and hematocrit of the men who were lost reside in the depths; it is in the shells. It is in the waves. The foam is no longer filthy. It is no longer a brine. They lost their lives, but my grandfather somehow lived. He survived. He pressed on. He fell in love. Built a life, and now I have mine.