MAP
58
This
week's theme: The Holocause: the sequel.
Submissions
for Issue #55 theme: The Holocaust, were just too voluminous to
include all the many good works, too important to waste. You poets
are totally awesome, and I thank each who submitted. I still don't
have the space to print all submissions. For possible poem placement
related to this theme, check out the "Nazi Hunter" website
in "Cool Web Sites section VI.
Upcoming
themes:
Issue
#59 - Ars Poetica: Poetry about Poetry
Issue
#60 - What are you doing New Year's Eve?
Issue
#61 - New Years Resolutions: Honey, I promise to change my lowdown
ways.
Issue
#62 - Cartwheel-Challenged Poets (All submissions eligible for
anthology: "Why I Wasn't A Dallas Cheerleader or It's Hard to
Write When Spinning")
And
now, on to the featured poetry.
1.
The first poem is by Jeramiah Frick, of Houston. Jer's father was
among the American soldiers who liberated Buchenwald.
From,
"Unspoken Dreams Recalled:
The
Fields of Buchenwald".
To:
Papa Edward, the gentlist man
I
ever knew.
Around
the tender age of five,
I
remember the first time.
Your
horrific night screams
Stirred
me from innocent slumber.
Mama
would comfort me and say,
Your
Papa has had a bad dream,
We
are here for you, we will always be
Here
for you.
As
young boy, I didn't really know much
About
my father, in his crisp military uniform.
I
knew he stayed at our side when the
Measels
& Whooping cough wracked my tissues.
I
knew he was fun when he took us
Into
the yard and spun us around airplane style.
Papa
always provided the sense
That
he would be there for us.
Only
when I became a man, and still heard
Those
night screams & fearful muffled mutterings,
Did
I understand Patton's Mission for him;
To
verify a Nazi's hidden atrocity...
When
His MASH unit was sent...
In
the horror of war enthralled
Years
later
His
unspoken dreams recalled
They
had harvested the Fields of Buchenwald.
2.
And from Alan Kaufman, of San Francisco - and PLEASE see Alan's
letter in the announcements section.
WHO
ARE WE?
Into
the past
I
go like a stranger
to
discover why at night
I
lay alone as a child
waiting
for the front door
to
slam, my father gone
to
night-shift work,
and
my mother, Marie, to enter,
unable
to sleep, and tell me
tales
of childhood
war,
pursued by those
who,
as she spoke,
seemed
to enter the room,
Gestapo
men in leather coats
who
ordered me to pack
and
descend to a waiting truck,
for
I am still going to Auschwitz
though
a grown man in 1998
I
am still boarding the freight,
crushed
against numbed, frightened
Jews
and Gypsies and Russian
soldiers
and homosexuals
crossing
frontiers to be gassed
I
am her, in my heart,
though
I am six feet two
and
two hundred and ten pounds
and
have played college football
and
served as a soldier
and
have scars from fights
with
knives and jagged
bottles
smashed on bars
I
am still her, little girl,
hiding
in chicken coops
and
forests, asleep on dynamite
among
partisans
I
am still her, brushing teeth
with
ashes
from
the ruins of nations
gutted
in war
I
am still her brown eyes
and
black hair of persecution
foraging
scraps of thistle soup,
a
star-shaped patch
sewn
to my shirt
I
am still my mother
every
day in the streets
of
New York or San Francisco,
the
chimney skies glow and swirl
with
soot like night above
a
crematorium, or the Bronx
incinerator
chute where I
threw
out trash in a brick
darkness
shooting sparks
I
am still her in the streets
of
Berkeley, walking among
sparechangers,
dyed-hair punkers,
gays
in stud leather, Blacks,
Mexicans
and Asians
I
am still her rounded up
among
poets and thieves
and
politically incorrect
social
deviants
on
sun-drenched sidewalks
in
the Mission and the Haight,
Greenwich
Village, the Lower
East
Side, or anywhere the weird
congregate
in tolerance
And
every day in this age
of
intolerance,
in
a mental ghetto
affirmed
by the homeless,
I
pass the dying
with
the loud ring of my boots,
ashamed
to think that perhaps
my
heels are the last thing
they
heard
Every
day I am a
survivor
of AIDS and poverty
Every
day I sit in cafes
watching
tattoos turn to numbers
and
I grow angry
I
want America back
I
want America to be
the
home I never had
And
you, who are you
if
you hear my voice?
Who
are you, stranger
if
you read these words?
Who
are we
who
stand threatened
in
these times of darkness?
Who
are we, condemned to die,
who
do not know ourselves
at
all?
3.
From Jerry Shepperd of Austin
AFTER
SEEING PICTURES OF AUSCHWITZ
Wire-strung
posts curve elegantly skyward,
Tuned
to unspoken sounds of suffering.
No
need to pluck or strum these strings: The groan
Of
unending time forces its tune from
Instruments
of hollow, empty bodies.
Corpses
walk among the buildings. Where are the
Laughing
children, the sounds of play? No cries
Of
pain, rage, frustration identify
These
as living, breathing humans.
Guards,
equally empty,
Silent,
are changed into something less,
Before
invoking the final solution.
4.
From Ian Reed of West Yorks, England
Tears
for Primo Levi
====================
Fifty-three
years and language separate me from history; his story.
Language
had no words for the damage done to a whole people, only to
individuals.
They
invented a new terminology in Auschwitz-Birkenau,
Buna,
Belzek, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, Majdanek, Buna and Dachau,
a
new way to chronicle the abomination of desolation,
the
darkness foretold in the scriptures and realised for successive
generations
to
wonder at, to study in school, to say never again. Until the next
time.
Yet,
separation aside, his writing still has the capacity to move me, stay
me,
bring me to a tear filled halt;
Those
foreign sounding words, now so frighteningly familiar, cry out with
an
appalling
beauty
Musselmann,
Kapo, Wstavac, Prominenz, Häftling, Selection, Shoa.
Words
for concepts in cruelty,
lessons
in violent aberration,
propositions
in mass hysteria,
which
this survivor could only paint a word picture of.
A
terrible, gentle, cruel, reflected image of what men become
when
they cease to be men and become instead, numbers. Six figure
numbers.