See
by Michael R. Burch

See how her hair has thinned: it doesn’t seem
like hair at all, but like the airy moult
of emus who outraced the wind and left
soft plumage in their wake. See how her eyes
are gentler now; see how each wrinkle laughs,
and deepens on itself, as though mirth took
some comfort there, then burrowed deeply in,
outlasting winter. See how very thin
her features are—that time has made more spare,
so that each bone shows, elegant and rare.
For life remains undimmed in her grave eyes,
and courage in her still-delighted looks:
each face presented like a picture book’s.
Bemused, she blows us undismayed goodbyes.

Keywords/Tags: Elderly, woman, grandmother, thin, thinning, hair, airy, emu, moult, soft, plumage, wrinkles, laugh lines, frail, gaunt, bones, winter, grave, eyes, courage, laughter, family, gathered, bedside, kisses, hugs, goodbyes, farewells, life, death, photo album, pictures, photos, photographs

Published by The Eclectic Muse, Love Me Knots (an anthology of the top 100 contemporary love poems), Nutty Stories (South Africa), Black Medina, The New Formalist, Better Than Starbucks, Potcake Chapbooks, Strange Roads, Sonnetto Poesia, Litera (UK), Poems About, Poetry Life & Times, MahMag (in a Farsi translation by Dr. Mahnaz Badihian), Somewhere Along The Beaten Path (Anthology), Freshet, Life & Legends, Famous Poets & Poems, Short Quotes & Poems (listed in the top 10 short poems) and Victorian Violet Press. “See” won 3rd place in the 2003 Writer’s Digest Rhyming Poetry contest, out of over 18,000 overall entries, and was published in Writer’s Digest’s The Year’s Best Writing.

Pfennig Postcard, Wrong Address
by Michael R. Burch

(for the victims and survivors of the Holocaust)

We saw their pictures:
tortured out of our imaginations
like golems.

We could not believe
in their frail extremities
or their gaunt faces,

pallid as our disbelief.
They are not
with us now ...

We have:
huddled them
into the backroomsofconscience,

consigned them
to the ovensofsilence,

buried them in the mass graves
of circumstancesbeyondourcontrol.

We have
so little left
of them

now
to remind us ...

It was my honor to work with survivors of the Holocaust as we translated their poems and prose accounts into English as a way of preserving them and making them available to larger audiences. Unfortunately, time waits for no one and the Holocaust survivors I worked with are no longer with us. But their words and testimonies remain, if we will only take the time to read and consider them. Keywords/Tags: Holocaust, victims, survivors, mass graves, pictures, images, tortured, frail, gaunt, skeletal, emaciated, thin, malnourished, golemic, horror, terror, inhumanity, madness, racism, antisemitism, slave labor, slavery, death camps, concentration camps, gas chambers, ethnic cleansing, genocide, memory, remembrance, memorial, tribute

I was the nail in a coffin
                       of hardship.

But just because I was a nail
didn't disconnect me from
                the ideology of my use.

I held it together,
        for many this was to much,
brittle and frail they never dug
                                  down deep.

Where I held this all together,
          I wasn't about to let life
pull me out,.

I was a nail, holding my life together,
           a coffin of hardships that 'll
                                        bury one day..

but for now I'm in deep enough
                          to keep it together.

i am.
like an old porcelain doll
cracked.
i don't want to be dropped
I'll shatter,
pieces all over the floor.
on a shelf i sit
next to others sitting pretty
in dresses and makeup
looking like people they aren't.
i am quiet but honest
because i need protecting.
i know where i've been recently
i've been covered in dust
sitting alone
in a room with no one to hold me.
pushing myself off the shelf,
allowing the cracks to move
across my
body.

There were warning signs to beware,
great walls you had to climb,
more parcels inside,
sealed with labeled reminders
to handle with care.
That a wrong cut of a wire
could trigger explosives,
that the place wasn't just fragile,
it was also volatile.

There's a reason why
from miles away you'd been told
to keep your own distance.
Why this wasn't just something
you could happen to stumble upon,
but a shipwreck, a paper town,
a lost city you needed to find.

When it dawned upon you
that this was not paradise,
but a haunted cemetery of some kind,
you snuck your way back
to the hole you fell into;
burning the place to the ground,
like the ones who came before you.

Flutter of an evening chill
the black rain, bores into me

Another diamond
engulfs me

Opaque
Tarnished
Branded

Announces
a failing
flickering candle
then smoke

The lower breeds
Lust
Consumes

Head placed upon the middle of your pillow,
leaving a circular dent surrounding it-
Your pigtails on the side,
tied in pink and red bows.

An attire of frilly, cotton, pyjamas,
tainted with dainty flowers-
a total of 32 spastically placed.

Memories
Filled with frills and pixie dust,
along with the shards of glass
-lined with blood.

Thinking back,
On the beauty of the moments,
Of the innocence that once filled your mind-
gently placed upon the pillow
lined with delicate lace,
beneath your frail, fazed face.

I leave a trail of shattered hearts.. so frail..
Clumsy I am...