ghosts

did you like my poem, the one where i'm  locked behind the barb wire of Auschwitz

with my foot blown off and my head shaved and tattooed black? How we ate

at the wooden bunks and had jobs as tailors or cooks to be spared the Zyklon-B

so strong as not a single life was  left to climb the backs of strangers to the top

where the air was less rich; less of renature, less penitence. And that's why my hands

have taken the shape of clay skulls because when I think of the creator as the final undivided 

arbiter and how the killings slowed down when we prayed for the Russians to come for our

liberation. Which is classical, humanistic revival of the best of mankind walking among

our skin and bones brother.

Otherwise you'de think I dance through this like Biggie Smalls rapping outside the studio

and only on the last rhyme to be offered a recording contract. Mother, what is fair now?

When so easily folks are capable of being removed? We moved to the suburbs in 86

 after the basement flooded again and mom lost all the meat in the freezer and the water

tank, which dad lost his grip on and slipped on the bottom stairs and sprained his knee

and swore even when mother forbad swearing. Again, it doesn't matter where a poem

strikes you and like all hostilities you have to let it have it's way until you profess

that all the itty-bitty  traces of it

are gone.

Reviews

[Coyote Poetry]

I e-mail the Michigan governor. Please send medicine to Detroit and the cities in need. No answer. The poor are forgotten and the money is nice but people need the proper medicine and care. I work as a over night pharmacy manager. The poor are stealing the needed medicine. This is sad. We can't keep up. The medicine should be brought to the people. The irony of your words tell the reader. Everything is wrong and you are right. Keep safe my friend.
Coyote

[h d e rushin]

thank you my friend, and you keep safe also. I too have heard these harrowing stories of theft of essential medicine like Tylenol or Advil..But this virus has pointed out a troubling aspect of civilization. Those in elected office often, for the sake of their own continued power, use language as control just like poets use anastrophe to invert the syntactical rhetoric in the name of clarity. Medicaid is another name for "poor"; section 8, another name for helpless. Before it is too late, we need freedom to return.....dana

[Coyote Poetry]

I agree my friend. I hope we can find freedom again.

[barleygirl]

By juxtaposing the holocaust with individual family trauma reminds me of how some people will deflect a comment about how bad things are these days by insisting that humans have always been bad to each other, as if this completely deflates anyone's right to have a response to the madness. It's hard to measure how bad things have gotten, but I'm not reassured by thinking it been much worse, like say, the holocaust! Love your acerbic thought-provoking wit. Here's hoping you & yours are well. (((HUGS))) Fondly, Margie

[h d e rushin]

so true. and we see it so often when we look at the leaders of this country...(and i'm being careful here because when it comes to politics people are so quickly defensive). How do we be cautious in 2020 Margie? What I mean is, how do we keep from falling in the whole of dogma and ignorance that is so quickly explained away by saying "the past is the past"? The past is never the past when people are still walking around with hatred in their hearts...and with numbers stamped on their forearms...thanks love...for your kindness...

[Moonie]

I think it is important to remember those brave men and women who lost their lives to the holocaust. Your writing is so strong, and fierce. I don't know whether I should talk about your words, or the sentiments behind them. I'm gonna try to do both.
The imagery here is so vivid and sinister, it really moved me. The barb wire, the coldness of the atmosphere that nips at your body, I actually felt transported, and could see the snow covered barracks so clearly, the countless men and women, each of whom had had a unique identity and personality in their previous lives, now reduced to a faceless herd.
I applaud you to have found words to describe those atrocities. It sickens me that someone is capable of depriving so many innocent people of their identities, and getting away with it for so long, and it sickens me even more that there are monsters out there who still support such racist propaganda.
I'm glad we have poets like you who are writing on topics like these, and bringing them to light again!

[h d e rushin]

it boggles my mind how horrible the world is, even when there is room enough for all of us. Are poets the only ones left who grieve for the lost? I hope not..thank you dearest for your kind words...dana

[lakinbob]

If it was just numbers that counted, take Mao Zedong, responsible for fifty/sixty million deaths, Ghengis Khan, 40 million, Stalin 20 million, ably assisted by Vasily Blokhin, one of the most evil buggers to have ever walked this planet, (read up on the animal.) And of course, we're still at it, aren't we, Syria being just one example, with 30,000 plus little children and over 15,000 women, murdered by men who wear Armani suits and stand in front of microphones spouting s**t. Can't stand any of them, cowards to their boots and I'd love the chance to have just five minutes alone with the b******s.

But of course, the Holocaust is not really about the numbers is it, more the systematic, almost production line way it was carried out, sort of just another day at the office, like the way we process chickens nowadays. Christ, the evil that men do, sickens me sometimes.

Gonna stop my rant now, see what your poem did to me? Just finish by saying, sad to say, I see little hope for our species, and what there is, we don't really deserve.

[h d e rushin]

that's not a rant lakinbob, that's your heart beating. And how else should another human think about beheadings? At the root of outrage is a kind of normalcy. At Majdanek the Nazi's grew cabbages in a garden fertilized with the ashes of Jewish mothers . "The evil that men do" in the name of good far exceeds the bad they do in the name of horror...thanks for your insight my friend...dana

[emmajoy]

'.. had jobs as tailors or cooks to be spared the Zyklon-B
so strong as not a single life was left to climb the backs of strangers to the top
where the air was less rich; less of renature, less penitence... '

Dana, told you that i'd read this but needed time to respond. What to say.. incredibly difficult.

Your writing here is more harrowing than any other I've read in ten plus years in the cafe. It is partly to do with your chosen words and phrasing but, even more so, in what i need call a type of cynicism that people use for facts near unbelievable. Also from between clenched teeth and the most sensitive of hearts. You've set scenes that for many could be both vortex and void. Catharsis, perhaps. Don't know, probably. Each thought is incredibly visual; something that one could turn away from but NEVER must. Even now people refute the numbers who died. Superbly put, dana, with truth, and heart. and.. so much more... .. .. Your second stanza moves into more disaster, more ghosts walking life, deleting, highlighting what life is, can be.. how it changes colour and depth over time. All of it? Perhaps but.. Personal disasters hit home, but for many they fade .. or not.. perhaps. Who knows.

May I mention this: Worked for three months as a kibbutz volunteer. Heard from three residents how past family members had survived, two to live in darkness for the remainder of their lives. Many books have been written, read many after my stay, 'Holocaust Journey' by Sir Martin Gilbert tells how he took university students to various of the death camps.

[h d e rushin]

yes, my friend, I am drawing a graph in hopes of assessing both my performance and my progress, lol. I had an old neighbor (passed on now) who was at Ravensbruck the women's facility in northern Germany. She opened up to me one sunny afternoon about "hunger". About how after liberation she and the other captives ran into a field a tore open a cow. And I said to myself, "oh s**t", that is what true hunger is....thank you my friend for your wonderful comments...dana

[emmajoy]

How horrific that those dear souls did that, Dear heavens in tatters! Can't imagine it, have rarely if ever been truly hungry . Can someone stood aside from those terrible times in such camps ever, ever consider a single blink of how it was, how it touched once hopeful human beings. ' Man's inhumanity to man ' becomes meaningless.

Take care of yourself, please.

[Robert Trakofler]

Did i not review this? or did i review this in my mind... I can't remember, but I know this poem. perhaps I just read this and didn't remark thinking I would later after it saturated my head fully... I have what looks to me to be a yearbook from one of the concentration camps in it is pictures of some generals and then some general officers and then mid way thru the book filled with lots of photos of the wonderful military might of the third reich is just photographs of people sitting around at a picnic playing games eating brats and drinking beers. something you would expect to see say in a set of photos from der family picnic:( all awhile thousands of people are being tortured and killed like a food processing plant and they are all sitting around relaxing after a hard days work. The book creeps me out to no end. and this poem so reminds of of it... My Great uncle served under Patton and kept this book after they liberated one of the camps it is my intention to take it to the holocaust museum next time I go to DC... I cant find it in my heart to sell this book.

[h d e rushin]

I've never been to the nations capital. My bad. Something else to put on my bucket list..But the holocaust memorial, the Vietnam Wall, the Smithsonian Air museum are just a few things I promise to see before I leave this earth...thanks again for your kind remarks and this wonderful story my friend...dana

[Beccy]

A catharsis of sorts, such a visit, rather like poetry is to the poet.

We are like moths to a flame when it comes to tragedy, mostly self species inflicted, which we gather about ourselves like a cloak, layer upon layer, year upon year; 'tis a wonder, that insanity, rather than sanity, (whatever that is,) is not the norm.

Perhaps it won't be too long before all out itty-bitty traces are gone; give this beautiful planet some quality time to frolic in the sun.

Beccy.

[h d e rushin]

they say, that your not really American if at least once a week you haven't contemplated suicide,lol. When Sonia Sanchez was in the room with her dying brother, she spoke of ghosts as ancestors gathered together to comfort each other. So, as Maggie Smith wrote: "Let us talk more of how dark the beginning of the day is...Thank you love....dana

[Einstein Noodle]

ghost indeed ... the horrors leap at me h d ... and hang there on my chest .. Auschwitz ..is one of those horrors that must never be forgotten, in my opinion, ... as a world it can never be allowed to happen again... your second "verse" brings it home .. and to our American streets .. and to the struggles of displaced people within ones own neighborhood .. disenfranchised and kicked to the curb ... but good poetry .. tattooed on paper ... can remain alive indefinitely says i ;) love your stuff young lady! :)
E.

[h d e rushin]

I saw how the Jewish gathered together the courage to visit Auschwitz the other day. And I said to myself, why visit someplace that was the source of such great anguish and pain? And that's the point. A greater pain is to forget what happened there than to just remember what being there felt like. The second verse is, as you pointed out, how everything in life is about your own experiences of pain and loss....thank you my friend for your kind remarks...dana

[Einstein Noodle]

i am not sure i could visit .. even without being Jewish ..but i agree .. that is the point .. and for those families of the murdered and tortured ..a testament to the defeat of such evil ...

[jacob erin-cilberto]

ghosts revisit through our words as we write about past events...
and maybe hostilities need to lie in our lines...
rather than in outward actions.
we write the angst out of us...better to have that or will trap ourselves in our own kind of prison camp...one our psyche just cannot escape.
j.

[h d e rushin]

"We write the angst out of us"....what a line. And it's true, of course.....thank you my friend...dana