Rememberance

After an artifact of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, This piece of writing appeared (9/30/2017) on The BeZine hosted by Meta/Phor(e)/Play during the live "100,000 Poets (and friends) for Change (100TPC) people the world over...gathered to stand up and stand together for PEACE, SUSTAINABILITY, and SOCIAL JUSTICE.

Remembrance

    Before we left Oswiecim, went to work elsewhere for the devil, and left you to play your sweet clarinet for those officers' socials and decampment marches. Six of us said a Novena and made a promise in the bunker you built. Remember that sweet German marmalade, Albert? And those cups of tepid soup we brought to you those August nights? I remember your ready smile and broad hands. How capable you were with a carpenter's tools. We were, each of us, around 19 years old in September of 1944. Karol said you reminded him of his kid brother, the stubborn mass of your young muscles despite the starvation and hard labor you endured. You heartened us. And we loved you as we did another Jew, a Nazarene who was also a carpenter.

    In that place, where you worked alone those hot afternoons, in that bunker, we built together; the one made to protect the SS from an air-raid. The rest of us gathered there. And Bronislaw wrote our names and prisoner numbers on a scrap of paper that Karol ripped from an empty cement bag. We used the pencil left by a visiting inspector and right where you hid the evidence of the food we would stash for you, jelly jars and soup tins. Then, just there in the cement wall, inside an old vinegar bottle, after we said a prayer for survival, and if nothing else remembrance of our young lives, we secreted that scrolled paper after adding your name, Albert Veissid, and A12063, your prisoner number.

Girls in the Garden

Girls in the Garden


Because this is a love poem,
nudity should be expected
It may be cliché—but there will be flowers
and since this is love—gazing for hours.
A woman in love is a woman insane.
She'll sacrifice everything in ritual flames.


Love eternal sometimes ends in flames,
even if pledged in an oath or a poem.
Such loss, it is said, made Lilith insane,
her natural power is still not accepted,
replaced by her sister Eve, within hours;
she fled, and the footprints she left filled with flowers.


For Lilith's breath and her touch begat flowers
and thoughts of her body, for Adam, begat flames,
when she disappeared that man searched for hours;
he filled with lament and wrote sonnets and poems.
This longing for Lilith he had not expected.
If not for his Eve, he would be insane.


Eve complained to God, her man was insane.
God gave her some apples (they started as flowers)
then he slithered away as should be expected
from a snake in the grass or a bush full of flames.
God made Adam write lies in a very long poem
and recite it to both his wives for hours and hours.


Brainwashing these women took more than just hours,
and for millenniums since, women are seen as insane,
forbidden to speak or sing, or to poem.
Instead, they must quietly tend to the flames.
And when in their wake there grew tides of flowers,
the power of women remained unexpected.


Lilith and Eve behaved not as expected.
They studied and chanted like witches for hours.
Raising their power in starlight and in fiery flames.
Today, belief in a Goddess is considered insane,
and when women seem pretty, they are treated like flowers.
They're worshiped in plays and in dramatic poems.


The power of women is rarely accepted by scholars, or clerics, in love or insane. Yet young girls sit vigil for hours and hours. They tie up their hair in ribbons and flowers and speak secret wishes to candlelit flames. Writing their poems and calling God by her name.