Sisters Above

There were many (unfounded) stories and rumours of German spies parachuting into the UK as dressed as Nuns during World War II. These tales have found their way as plot devices into popular post-war literature and TV.

Catherine Lacey as the sinister nun in Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Her performance may have fuelled the rumours

Black tunics being blown upward in the updraft,
exposing pious petticoats, rippling in kind.
Whilst above them, great white wimples billow
guiding the gliding not-quite-nuns to the ground.

On the home front, the habit of gossip, gossips
of habits in the sky. So surely asserting they saw
those sisters’ descent. Stamping their stories
into folklore through chattering in post-office queues.

All the while, those that parachuted as penguins
have long landed, cast aside their cassocks
and taken to the local tweed. The only creed they
spread now is preached in punctuated code.

Pulses through the airwaves, back to the bosom
of The Fatherland. Sometimes in dots.
                                                              Sometimes dashes.
Graeme Green

If you have any thoughts about this poem,  Graeme Green  would like to hear them