The Sound of the Struggle

by Charles Rammelkamp — The Friday Poem on 20/09/2024

We love a poem that tells a story, especially one as interesting as this. The language is precise and measured, and each stanza holds just as much information as it needs. It delivers what it promises, and wraps up with a neat little kicker, too.

The Sound of the Struggle

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I always saw our name 
as a wave coming in to shore,
the curl of the ‘r’, the undulant ‘m’s,
the finality of the ‘p’ lapping the beach. 

“It means the sound of the struggle”
my father told me when I asked.
Kampf, as in Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
His struggle.

He also hinted at another, less salubrious meaning, 
becoming vague and evasive when pressed.
We settled on “the sound of the struggle”,
left it at that.

Years later, browsing through a bookstore,
I found a book called 
The International Dictionary of Obscenities,
a guide to dirty words and indecent expressions

in Spanish, Italian, French, German, Russian.
I came upon the word ‘rammeln’:
“to screw, copulate with [‘to buck, rut’]”
and a lightbulb went on in my head.

“Nuptial chambers,” my linguist friend confirmed,
though I thought more along the lines
of farm animals in a field or camp;
“rammen” the German for “ram”.

But when we visited cousins in Nordhorn, Germany,
they took us  to a small creek 
that formed a border with Holland.
On one side of the Rammelbeek River, Germany;

on the other, the Netherlands.
“This is the source of the family name”
Dietmar asserted with confidence,
and who was I to disagree?

I wasn’t going to fight it.

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Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. A collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, will be published by BlazeVOX Books.