Windows of Black

 

On liberating Auschwitz-Birkenau

(for Rocko Impreveduto)

 

Email to Al Sullivan

 

All the windows are black now

Bruised light seeping through somehow

A blind eye groping for its edge

Blind fingers feeling for a blistered edge

 

Thick walls built long before I was born

Decorated with people’s hopes forlorned

A limb left here; a heart dropped there

Reading doesn’t capture its terrible air

 

My ming standers by the numbers who came this way

The six million sould whose faces fade

What terrible thing did any of them do

Except to bear the burden of being jews

 

Gone are all those who kept them here

Ghosts who haunt can shed no tears

Only the living can if they will

That is those who can remember still

 

I read a book and it’s not the same

No Nazi guard screaming out my name

A soldier tole me hw once stepped on bones

He at first thought were stones

Then each time he tried to tie his shoes

He wondered what in their place he would do

Remembering above all when he thought back

About the windows he saw and thought were black.

 

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email to Al Sullivan

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