Selected Poems concerning the Holocaust.
Cover design by Cristina Burke-Trees at AtelierB
All illustrations within the text by Rebecca A. Birtwhistle
Surely a death defining moment
that gave an unbearable clarity to life.
Not that death had never called.
It seemed to visit every night
the clump clump clump on stairs
which bundled everyone to clammy
shelters, concrete sepulchres
where sirens blared and searchlights
gathered
canisters, fire, smoke tumuli
and screams; the shocking stillness
of a doodlebug, immobile -
not even a dragonfly's whirr of wings
when watching the world's last moment
through facets of a compound
eye before the great explosion.
Nor was it a moment for tidying up
the dead, pushing a chair beneath
the table, straightening flowers,
clearing away words.
As soon
as the projector whirred, cockerel
crowed, you looked straight into my gaze
Looking into your charnel house
where heaps of people, mostly skeletons,
clung to one another like grim death
and choreographed macabre climbs
up the still shiny bulldozer blade.
Was this the last trump, the incorruption:
no tenderness, no laying out … best
clothes?
Had all these people starved to death
with no-one clamouring they were
human once? Not logs or branches,
scoops of mud, on which tired army
drivers flick their ash then juggle gears
to push more corpses, higgledy-piggledy
in piles, numbers unregistered -
certainly not names - liberating them
crazily, as only bulldozers can, head over heels into an abyss.
I often see you
round the house, your photograph
another daughter,
forever smiling
and so mischievous. I reach to
touch your father’s grief
crushed in Pandora’s
shell along with every
other misery
plus splash of hope which,
like the sea sounds nestling in
the shell, calls poignant
memories to life.
They settle in the vacant
place set daily for
the absent guest and,
with their waves, insinuate
sea-gull cries and spray,
sand castles, children
learning how to swim, hermit
crabs - too bereft a
metaphor when left
to seek new shells - and foamy
rush of waves along
the beach. Slow motion
shifts of surf - so purely white
their seething roar - now
sweep the terns inshore
to seek their food, winding them
up strong wind powered
climbs to plunge. Surfing
a rather different sea,
the sparrow hawks float
blue velvet waves that
lap along the forest glades
of this grim wilderness
which plucked discarded
families from their homes to lie
in half forgotten
graves, where Arctic winds
bring misery, till Spring cloaks
death in myriad
shades of green. Summer
calls the cuckoo home, and chiff
chaffs pipe the pine tree
trails, as birches stir
and murmuring bees breathe new
life to heather seas.
Music: Gillian Webster Sumner © 2009;
Nota Bene: Diana Draisey - soprano, Cathie Hartigan - soprano, Julie Dawick - alto, Keith Wainwright - tenor, John Draisey - bass;
Zwicifstwo jests przes walka*
Salt mine. You think Siberia: the name
for exile and near certain death.
Wieliczka:
a Polish Siberia for Jews held
in its underworld until despatched
at Auschwitz. Nicolaus Copernicus,
inventor of sun-centred worlds, came here
conscious of earth’s daily revolution
circling annually round the sun. Goethe
visited. His humanistic individualism
centred here, one passing day, the culture
round which German Romanticism revolved
until one man’s crazy vision for the world gave
Sturm und Drang a wholly unexpected meaning.
And one of the four survivors of four hundred
slaves, detained with salt mine status making
aeroplanes, returned. Rescued from troglodytic
Hell, conveyor-belted to Detroit to put
forced skills to work on cars until both legs go
missing in a street-car accident. Compensation
provides the means to show his children Hell:
a subterranean Disneyland where gnomes
hack salt from giant seams to furnish pools
across which dying swans and Lohengrin can sail
cathedral caverns, Snow-white efflorescences
and dwarves - Hey, Ho! - who paint Da Vinci’s enigmatic
smiles in salt and sculpt last supper masterpieces.
They also sculpt the spirits of the caves: the pick-axed
miner, with spike and Davy lamp; sawyer with axe
and cross-cut saw, joint guardians of the nether
world’s strange phantasmagoria. The one digs
riches from the world, the other fells forest
hectares from the country-side to store
in seams of salt preserve beneath the ground
from which they’ll sparklingly re-emerge
a secret army. Shoulder to shoulder
in solidarity, glittering with
crystal energy along three hundred kilometres
of front, and led by ghostly liberators:
of Monte Cassino and Prague - Anders … Swierczewski.
* Victory is in the struggle - J K Pisudski