These nightmares
Are black and white
Rectangle pieces of paper
Because colored
Cuts would hurt
Too much

Instead we track
Railway cars packed
People stacked
And dropped behind
Barbed wire restraints
Bare burnt brick buildings
Were soldier’s stole
Pretty clothes
Trinkets, and anything gold

Never forget
The nearly naked numbered men
That barely survived
The acid burning
Of women and children
Starving saints
More bone than flesh
Ovens made to cook
The stolen Skin of their kin

We hold such horrors
Far away
Keeping shallow thoughts close
While Forgetting those
Who suffered such indignities
But this is our shared history
Lessons we need to see repeatedly
So we do not let others succeed in
Seeding the same dark tyranny
In our modern democracy

I don't understand why it's different for you.
Why it's different for you,
a people who have suffered,
a people who are Jew.  
To **** in your name,
a child who's turned blue.
In the dust from the home that once they held proud,
on land that you stole and then that you blew
to bits that are small
now smothered in blue
with sharp shrapnel that you
spread in the name of the few.

Why is it different?
Why, for the child who walked slowly through,
through the gates from the train,
on a ticket you knew
was only ever one way.
Did the mothers at Treblinka
deserve to go through,
the gates or the hurt
to watch their child torn
from a heart where they grew
to gasp a long breath
a gassed breath to the last,
smothered to blue.

Has nothing been learned by you, who cry true
from the past and the hurt, by
a people who are Jew.
The few who survived and echoed the cry,
a cry undisturbed by the thousands who died
a crime of our times, denied by the few,

I don't understand why it's different for you.
Why it's different for you,
a people who are Jew.  
In Gaza or Auschwitz,
the cry of a child
echoes eerily the same.
whether dying from gas
or bombs that you blame
on Hamas or God
the result is the same
the mother's heart ripped
and torn in two.

I don't understand why it's different for you.
To ****  the thousands
to get at the few.
I wonder if those who died for being Jew
would welcome the children of Gaza
the children who knew
they'd died just like them,
innocent and blue.

oy vey
everyday, oy vey
Granny couldn't get through
an hour without a dour
oy vey

the woeful phrase I recall,
though most of all, I still see her
scrubbed raw, red paws, always
clutching a tissue, to keep
the ghastly germs at bay

the ones she believed
yet survived the camps
no matter how much time
and scalding baptismal
water had flowed

though far from the filth
even farther from the ovens, safe
she still said oy vey and held the tissue tight
perhaps to keep out the night
I never had to see
oy vey, oy vey

I think God might
Be a little prejudiced
To divide the world
Into many names of himself
For once he asked me to

Join him for a walk
But said his name was Divinity?
There was no mention

Of this fellow called God
Or why the Christian God
Or Allah were particularly key?
All Gods misrepresent nature
Where there is injury, pardon

And where there is doubt, faith
Where there is despair, hope
Where there is strife, unite

You don’t need a God to do it
But just a bit of goodness, humanity
I think God might
Be getting a little old
For the pope to finally accept homosexuality?

I think God is a bit of a buffoon
Unless you can sow love, for hatred
And show charity not only for your people

Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist
I think they all pray equally well
Though even the anarchist and agnostic
Hope for a better world than this!
I think God might be a bit out of date

Maybe it’s time to write a new book
And call it scripture, call it holy
To be understood, as to understand

To seek to console, to be consoled
To be loved, as to love
It’s all really the same.