Archive
02/25/10 - (2)
Ten Years
When those tattered, ragged, bedraggled Russian soldiers Liberated the lice and blowflies of Oswiecim's latrine, Which were what our body-bags of bones had come to, Set free, from dying's comforting embrace, The skeletal simulacrum of my once-proud essence As an athletic adolescent in the city of Cracow, I was all of fifteen, all at once completely bereft, A newly shaped orphan who, in all of a half-decade, Had seen disappear, into thick, human-fat-polluted air, Thirty-three members of my near and distant family, Amidst the Nazis' mad rush to judge Jews As a blight on their Aryan purity, a deviation from their faith. That was January 27, 1945 — I remember; believe me. Today, I'm eighty and desperate to make it to ninety, Despite surviving a life of quiet desolation, in America, A leftover of Theresienstadt, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, A broken soul with a green-blue serial number Injected into my left wrist (that birthmark I got late in life), A poet of some minor note (Not as good as T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound But not as bad as those Jew haters, whom history salutes), A survivor by default, death-and-dumb luck, Who's finally conceived his Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Begun to cogitate on the project I have to complete: Composing one poem for each of the six million Who died without an obituary, a footnote to his/her history... A poem for each person, to commemorate existence. And I hope God will give me the ten years I'll need To compose 600,000 poems per year, 50,000 per month, 12,500 per week, 1786 per day, 75 per hour, 1.25 poems per minute, minute to minute to minute, Without sleeping, eating, drinking — Camp life again (Indeed, I'll have to approach this massive undertaking With the same severely systematic precision Those actuarial geniuses utilized to complete their mission). But even if I'm given a decade to finish my life's work, Each poem will have to be limited to one line, Which encapsulates, distills the meaning of the Holocaust, A synthesis, synecdoche, symbol, word for the Shoah, Something, perhaps, on the order of "Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?"
02/25/10 - (2)
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