"auschwitz" poems
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to **** you.
You died before I had time ----
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My ****** friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You ----
Not God but a ********
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the *****
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.
If I've killed one man, I've killed two ----
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagersnever liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you ******* I'm through.
29.7k
Many people write a "bucket list" of things they want to do before they die. Now in my 80th year, I don't have the time or the energy to do things that others might aim for, but I have during my life visited many places, seen many things, and enjoyed many experiences that I would have been sorry to miss. There have also been some events that I would have preferred not to experience, but which have enriched my life in different ways, and which I remember with a kind of sad affection.
Some of these are very personal to me, and would not be interesting to most people, but read the note if you wonder why I chose them.
Here then is what I might call
My Reverse Bucket List
Towns and cities – architecture & atmosphere
Barcelona, Spain
Venice, Italy
Oxford, England
Jerusalem, Israel
Luxor, Egypt
Varanasi, India
Hiroshima, Japan
Pompeii, Italy
Other locations
Galápagos islands, Ecuador
Great Barrier Reef, Australia
North Woolwich, London
Churches
St Paul's Cathedral, London
Sagrada Familia, Barcelona
Coventry Cathedral
Córdoba Cathedral, Spain
Blue Mosque, Istanbul
Other structures
Taj Mahal, Agra
Auschwitz concentration camp, Poland
Royal Festival Hall, London
London underground system (because it was the first, and I rode it for a long time). Also the more splendid underground railways of Mexico City and Moscow.
Avebury Ring, Wiltshire, England (the largest prehistoric stone circle in the world, and much more primitive than Stonehenge)
Bayeux Tapestry
"Angel of the North" statue, Gateshead, England
"Christ the Redeemer" statue, Rio, Brazil
Events
Messiah at Royal Festival Hall, Feb 1959, with the girl later to be my wife
St John's night, Spain, early 1990s (?)
Death and funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, Aug 1997
Oberammergau passion play, 2010
Destruction of World Trade Centre, Sept 2001
Sep 17, 2018
Sep 17, 2018 at 9:16 AM UTC
Anger,
as black as a hook,
overtakes me.
Each day,
each ****
took, at 8:00 A.M., a baby
and sauteed him for breakfast
in his frying pan.
And death looks on with a casual eye
and picks at the dirt under his fingernail.
Man is evil,
I say aloud.
Man is a flower
that should be burnt,
I say aloud.
Man
is a bird full of mud,
I say aloud.
And death looks on with a casual eye
and scratches his ****
Man with his small pink toes,
with his miraculous fingers
is not a temple
but an outhouse,
I say aloud.
Let man never again raise his teacup.
Let man never again write a book.
Let man never again put on his shoe.
Let man never again raise his eyes,
on a soft July night.
Never. Never. Never. Never. Never.
I say those things aloud.
12.4k
Autism Speaks don’t speak for me.
Cause I reject their reality.
What if I felt the exact same way
about their neurotypicality?
See, normal?
It’s a peculiar word,
and I guess it means I’m not following the herd.
But I don’t see why you want me gone—
At least I’m alive. At least I’m strong.
******
My existence a crime.
A baby they’d abort if they’d only had the time.
Early detection.
Eugenics by another name.
Autism speaks till you silence it without shame.
Auschwitz for Autism, soon to be in business—
Neurotypical Nazis, only trying to finish us
Yeah, to you we’re hardly people,
and driving off a cliff with your daughter isn’t evil?
Well, here’s another wakeup call for the sheeple.
You exterminate so much you make the Daleks look peaceful.
Well, aren’t I human? Answer me please.
Because your fear and “awareness” has me down on my knees.
Oct 1, 2014
Oct 1, 2014 at 3:56 PM UTC
I enter Auschwitz 1.
Apprehensive crunches with every step.
I stand in a gas chamber.
Fully clothed.
With oxygen flowing freely.
I stand on a spot where thousands have stood before me.
But I'm able to make an exit,
Yet I'm rooted to the floor,
Transfixed with horror.
I feel like the last remaining tree,
surrounded by a forest of death.
Deforestation makes me sick.
*
Birkenau has a secret
that it doesn't want to tell.
A broken ending stood still.
The arches.
The ruins.
The tracks.
Thuds of reality slapping my face.
Stood inside the bleak barracks,
our guide asks us
"Imagine what it would like to be here -
What you'd see,
smell,
hear."
My eyes widen open in a scream,
they sting, fighting back at the image conjured within my mind.
I take a sharp breath
and close my eyes.
I am scared.
Nov 18, 2010
Nov 18, 2010 at 10:00 AM UTC
I've been to Auschwitz
It's quite a nice place really
If you're not Jewish.
Oct 21, 2014
Oct 21, 2014 at 10:50 AM UTC
Shema (“Listen”)
by Primo Levi
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
You who live secure
in your comfortable homes,
who return each evening to find
warm food and a hearty welcome ...
Consider: is this a “man”
who slogs through mud,
who has never known peace,
who fights for scraps of bread,
who lives at another man's whim,
who at his "yes" or "no" lies dead.
Consider: is this a “woman”
shorn bald and bereft of a name
because she lacks the strength to remember,
her eyes as void and her womb as frigid
as a winter frog's?
Consider that such horrors have indeed been!
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them in your hearts
when you lounge in your beds
and again when you rise,
when you venture outside.
Rehearse them to your children,
or may your houses softly crumble
and disease render you equally as humble
so that even your offspring avert their eyes.
Primo Michele Levi (1919-1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist, writer and Holocaust survivor. He was the author of two novels and several collections of short stories, essays, and poems, but is best known for If This Is a Man, his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. It has been described as one of the best books by one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His unique work The Periodic Table was shortlisted as one of the greatest scientific books ever written, by the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Levi's autobiographical book about his liberation from Auschwitz, The Truce, became a movie with the same name in 1997. Keywords: Holocaust, poem, Italian, translation, man, mud, woman, bald, nameless, houses, homes, bread, eyes, womb, empty, void, frigid, lifeless, horror, horrors, hearts, write, etch, engrave, inscribe, children, offspring, disease, avert, reject
Mar 14, 2020
Mar 14, 2020 at 4:58 AM UTC
One nightmare I had a dream, a dream of a terrible exhibit.
I was at a camp where nightmares grew, a place evil and ridged.
A profound impression was left on me,
the simplest of it all was the shoes in block 5.
The simplicity of it all seemed crazy,
this place called Auschwitz where I wandered in disbelief.
Imagine if such evil was in power today
with access to all our technology.
Cattle for the slaughter, they would slaughter us all,
their hate-filled solution for the innocent soul.
Human beings are inherently cruel this exhibit rang sadly true.
Fascism with applied biology, a profound impression to say the least.
The simplicity of it all seemed crazy,
a room full of shoes, battered and abused,
a room full of shoes from dead babies.
A profound impression was left on me.
This place called Auschwitz
where I wandered in disbelief.
Jul 4, 2013
Jul 4, 2013 at 5:10 AM UTC
new york glasses boy asks questions
in auschwitz: were there americans in concentration camps?
in krakow: are europeans a race?
in budapest: are you okay? why don’t you want people to sing to you?
at dinner i hide from the orange rubber cake
people try to sing and i try to run
after much mulling over a recycled candle
i wish for a simple easy adulthood and contemplate flinging myself into the danube.
Feb 25, 2014
Feb 25, 2014 at 1:00 PM UTC
I shake awake in the sleep…
The invisible dialogues, unable
to distinguish from darkness
vexes me...
I have heard the sob of the horn bill of the freedom
throughout the half broken dreams…
you also may blame me like my mother
that it’s because not pray to God when I go to bed…
For how many ‘freedoms’
I've been kept decorated
in the living room?
the fishes in aquariums
are not the beauty kept in the glass pots
but freedom closed in the glass…
While the fishes argue that
the three quarter of the world has made for them,
looking towards the open canopy of freedom,
the love birds, quibble me from the cages
that what I caged is the word of ‘freedom’ itself.
Doubtlessly, creating Auschwitz cells in living rooms
how can I speak about the freedom?
Having exempted the birds towards canopy of indulgence
the fishes to the sea of the rights,
I went to fly in the freedom of sleep
forgetting to pray to God…
then, I know
the birds from the canopy of indulgence
and the fishes from the sea of the rights,
are praying God for the sake of me…
Aug 29, 2014
Aug 29, 2014 at 1:54 AM UTC
My bed is a mass grave
My toilet is a mass grave
My kitchen sink is a mass grave
Stretched out in lines of chrysalis coke, choking the evanescent life that could have been. Straight into the empty Coca Cola can you go. A litany of atrocity in every bed, futon, desks, truck stop bathroom, camera lens, attempting to capture the genocide on film.
Alas, the lens is Covered with white, bioluminescent death.
Choking the unborn in the ****** drain.
Coffee mug refill, for but a single dime,
sweaty palms connected to strained veins on wrists,
connected to thrusting elbows.
Firing wrist rocket, V2, V1, buzz bomb.
Unsuspecting future citizens, blocks of thousands at a time.
Tadpoles, rotting in murky basement suits the world over.
The war is on.
Auschwitz, Dachau, Sachsenhausen.
Arbeit Macht Frei.
Swim for dear life
Apr 29, 2014
Apr 29, 2014 at 11:54 PM UTC
Even from behind the glass,
you can smell the chemical
that keeps the moths away.
A vast mound of matted sheep’s wool
you would say, except (they assure you)
it is original, all two tons of it,
the human hair that was left
unused at the end.
The rest went for socks
to keep workers’ feet warm.
All grey now, sixty years on, it has aged
as those that owned it never did.
They went naked to the shower room,
clutching the soap
they would never use,
and then to the ovens.
A lorry’s engine drowned the screams,
and the Governor’s wife tended her flowers,
making a garden “like paradise.”
Jan 28, 2018
Jan 28, 2018 at 11:22 AM UTC
every time i travel to Warsaw i fall in love,
i stand on the central Warsaw train-station,
and there's this girl checking her
mobile interet, phone,
and she looks pretty...
and... i really don't want to **** her like
the guys **** her in ***** movies...
maybe that''s shy i'm considered
"effeminate"....
maybe...
i just didn't **** enough women...
or maybe...
i speak the tongue of the crusaders...
but we sent the artillery...
the beautiful women to the Arab
******
and kept the nation safe...
Islam, akin to the comparison
of the Bubonic Plague...
Islam... virus of the mind...
i'll contest thi...
i'll ******* die for this...
i've been feeling weird for the past
few days....
Tom Petty died....
so... why would anyone give
a **** if Wayne Static
does the coffer?
so... i'm supposed to care?!
**** you!
Jeff hanneman died...
but do you see me,
making a case for a ******* parade?!
no?
good... that's how i like it...
******* south London
plonker!
every single time...
i fall in love with a girl
at the central train-station in Warsaw...
the love dies a sudden death...
when i get to the....
Western train station of Warsaw...
the Ukrainians et al...
the Mongols...
love's up,
dead, long gone...
i'm basically living
the enterprise in re-experiencing
a slow death...
feral lands...
these Polacks are like...
please don't land in Warsaw....
i know...
Krakow has Auschwitz as a tourist
destination...
but... but...
you will not see the generic
schematic of globalization...
every time i travel to Warsaw i fall in love,
and then i think of "it"...
**** marriage..
no thanks,
you have it covered...
on your way;
i might not be on the winning side,
but sure as ****
i'm also not on the losing side either...
and t think...
that i could even concise my
life within the confines of
imitating my father...
i could have...
but then... life...
isn't exactly a chance on bet within the confines
of a roulette.
Oct 15, 2018
Oct 15, 2018 at 9:54 PM UTC
i do a really good imitation of a woodpecker with my hand clenched into a fist, knocking on my forehead, as if knocking on the forehead of others - i admit, i'm searching for an echo of the rat-tat-tat thumping drill for the cure of headaches.
when i inherit what i might inherit
i'll book a ticket to switzerland's auschwitz,
but drinking a bottle of whiskey
and a few beers each day... i'm praying to the gods:
gods! a heart attack! gods! a second haemorrhage!
gods! a heart attack! darwinism taught me
insignificance... so i countered...
well... an insignificant theory and practice...
like nietzsche said about the darwinists:
'imagine speaking for the entire human race!'
well, english journalists already do...
and i'm like hey hey hooray for iraq!
get blown up by a bomb i'd like my limbs back,
or at least the idea of having them once...
shiny happy people holding hands!
**** old age and grandchildren, there's no
accomplishment in that... fake teeth like
no teeth at all... apple goo pulp and then porridge...
what a great reward! ooh! ah! i'm all geared up
for that fear of death... no... i'm scared of being 100 years old;
i wouldn't be, had i been born a Galapagos turtle.
Apr 2, 2016
Apr 2, 2016 at 10:34 PM UTC
Dear State Counsellor.
Once I saw you as an icon of morality.
A bastion of hope.
A ‘dancing peacock’ in a troubled world.
Some called you the ‘midwife of democracy’.
Others an ‘Oxford housewife’,
a peacock ready to show its eyes.
But now….
The Children, babies, women and men of the Rohingya
are butchered, ***** and murdered by your
soldiers as you read poetry to children.
And the rest of the world stands by waiting for
the Norwegians to take away your Nobel Peace Prize.
Another sense of justice, lost again.
The working hands of the Muslim men in Rakhine
are tied by the Buddhists, the lovers of peace.
Their guns gleaming and your army standing by.
“It wasn’t us” say the Generals
“It was the Buddhists”.
But of course we have seen this before.
At Srebrenica, Nanking, My Lai and Auschwitz,
until the gas came.
And the world stands by.
Another failure, another genocide.
Now, as your military load the death carts
and bury mothers next to their children.
The Buddhists place flowers on the mass graves.
And I call for you and your ‘men’
to be accountable for those burnt by the sun.
Aug 29, 2018
Aug 29, 2018 at 9:18 PM UTC
I have died many times. My body hung next to Jesus at Golgotha. I was once decapitated in the French Revolution. I’ve had my eyes gouged out at Gettysburg.
I have died many times. My chest was riddled with bullets on the beaches of Normandy. My lungs dissolved and I had a stroke in Auschwitz. My skin baked, bubbled, and blistered from Hiroshima to Nagasaki.
I have died many times. I bled out from a ruptured heart during Columbine. On 9/11, my rib caged cracked and I even stopped breathing.
_______________________________________________________________
I have died too many times. I shot myself in the head last night. Dream-spells dripped out from the void and so I shot myself through the heart, stuck my fingers in the hole to see if it hurt and it stung a little.
I have died too many times. I took an ax and split my head open; a flock of pigeons were pecking at my cortex. They flew out and church hymns rang from my cerebellum.
I have died too many times. I lit a bonfire in my brain; the light burst from my eye sockets and now my head is a paper lantern. I clawed at my chest till I ripped my heartstrings; they sung happy birthdays in Arabic so I blew out the fire.
I have died too many times. I took a baseball bat and busted my face open; I was swinging for the fences and swallowed my teeth on accident.
I have died too many times. I tore out my stomach, drank the acid, and ****** myself. I tried pulling my lungs over my head just to suffocate.
I have died too many times. When I discovered my spinal cord, I plucked it out, wrapped it around my neck, and hung myself from the tallest redwood I could find.
Dec 22, 2013
Dec 22, 2013 at 2:54 PM UTC
Perhaps they had tried to escape,
or else done some petty crime.
These three would not be gassed or shot-
The rope would serve just fine.
Two men, one boy with nooses fixed-
condemned but never tried.
The nooses tightened on their necks
as they kicked the air and died.
Except the boy, he was too light
He lingered when they died
“Where is God?” one man muttered
“Where is He?” others cried.
They made us all march past the place
Where those three in judgment fell
The boy in his slow agony
still endured his private Hell.
The path we walked was ash and bone
Of former inmates made
Those gassed and buried in the air
These were their sole remains.
“Where is God? Where is He now?”
Some muttered as they passed.
I thought- if He’s not hanging here
More than likely He’s been gassed.
( based on an entry in a Auschwitz survivor’s memoir)
Jan 10, 2012
Jan 10, 2012 at 11:00 PM UTC
Stopped at a red light
The wait for it to turn green
Asking 'How long has it been?'
As stars guide the night.
Sudden blackout of all light
As dark as an Auschwitz scene
With monsters and fiends
And darkness sets in fright.
Your teeth glowed bright
There was light again
From a poet's pen
I found comfort at your sight.
You barricaded me in safety
And shone the light that saved me.
Apr 17, 2016
Apr 17, 2016 at 1:56 AM UTC
Mozart,
Shakespeare,
Picasso.
Auschwitz,
Hiroshima,
My Lai.
Two sides;
one culture.
*"Everybody's shouting,
which side are you on?"*
mce
Apr 11, 2015
Apr 11, 2015 at 10:02 PM UTC
the music did nothing
except send veins of pallid tears
down ashen cheeks that had forgotten
how to smile.
dust stole into our lungs
with spindly fingers
creeping like the gas,
killing like the furnaces it
escaped from.
i saw broken people standing
dead on their feet,
arms outstretched,
unaccustomed to the deep cavity in their chest
that their children used to fill.
there were no surprises in this life
except spare beds
that were quickly filled and emptied again
as often as bruises replaced by
faceless men patrolling past.
God was watching,
God was looking,
God was not seeing.
and still we were silent.
Apr 21, 2010
Apr 21, 2010 at 6:13 PM UTC
He lifted his hand, it shook.
He leaned towards speech, halting.
A stroke confined his feet
to shuffled, prayerful, praises.
The day pushed dusk through blinds.
“How you buh, beautiful?” (a rasp).
“You take your meds?” the nurse said.
“How you… to… today?”, finger pointing
(reminded of it's hook).
She smiled and smoothed his bed
"You flirtin’ again? You bad man.”
Once he'd made a vow, an oath
in Auschwitz-Birkenau:
Forced to pick gold from charred teeth,
he pledged to sidestep death… to live!
And walk - in love -
to the Sabbath.
Copyright © 2003 Gary Brocks
Aug 28, 2018
Aug 28, 2018 at 9:22 PM UTC
Tempestuous sky's so cold and dark,
where no bird flies save lonely lark,
'mongst the shadows, where coldness spreads,
stand sepia shapes of wooden sheds.
Oh whispering wind, what can you tell
of a life of terror and tormented hell
or torrid groans of sleepless souls
under public signs, nailed to poles.
Breath stained glass surrounds a child's shoe
an exhibit in a holocaust zoo.
Silenced bones can speak no guile
'mongst blackened ruins of brick and tile.
These broken spirits now must yield
to unmarked graves in an open field,
''O death where is thy sting ?''
'tis in the voice of these who cannot sing
and when we remember alone in the dark,
think of this place and the lonely lark.
© H V Swan
Sep 4, 2014
Sep 4, 2014 at 7:55 AM UTC
I once went to Auschwitz, dove in the shoes.
Saw bunch of mannequins in bomb shelters from the fifties.
the house wives listened to blues.
Saw Vietnam Memorial, passed out, ** Chi Min Got hot in d.c.
Cold War cold cuts were all the news, sewing old men toupees in our weaves.
Walked trenches through Germany in mustard gas rainclouds
Saw, **** between Trotsky and Lenin, before he was a mummy.
Listened to George Bush shake Barrack Obama's hand, we are free now.
Caught world war three on the midnight news tele.
In Shambala Destiny, Chocolate covered rose petals,
From the end of the space shuttles kettle.
Boil over tipping point, all your fighting is over.
The air hangs of hung weird folk.
We can hate everyone, but ourselves.
Each moment in history had some one to hate,
Statist tend to do that to opposing encroaching States.
WE get to own the slaves, the cows of neck tie collars,
Oligarchy of patriarchical, man meat, manipulative, demagogic, isolationist, miscreant, pro-government pseudo-capitalist, state CORPORATION dollars.
Join the army old men. You hold a gun like a limp ****
You gotta hold mine to my head, Cause money ain't doin' Viagra's trick.
I jump from a painting of war veteran spiritualism.
I give no glory to people fighting for my freedom.
I hate violence, no one will ever FIGHT for MY freedom.
I am Freedom.
No state can make me that way.
No gun in my hand will change evil men.
My words must be my gun.
No one will hold my weapon.
Evil is evil, you cannot change its face through plastic surgery, Prozac, religion, or painting any other name on true morals.
Mar 28, 2013
Mar 28, 2013 at 12:33 AM UTC