Quaint from a Distance

From airy complacent perspectives,
monkeys appear like angels.
But when more lowly based, they are
simply blind, deaf, and dumb.

From an apathetic view, roofs seem quaint
distressed red-wooden steps;
( Oh the things we unload
when we tear down the barn )
a ladder for God to get the hell away.

He was evicted,

from these garrisons,
from the pastoral settings
where blood-brick cottages
are tattoed with numbers;

Five for the Rom -
"Ring around the rosy."
Ten for the children -
Mengele had a pocketful
of cyanide posies.
Twenty for those dirty Jews -

" and we all fell down, "

even God...

Smokehouses exhaust Non-Aryan clouds
above this little village,
and proper German wives
can not be disturbed
with the cattle taken
from the cars to be slaughtered.

I think it's called content,
in flower-boxed homes
on the better side of the street.

These days had a dirty kind of rain,
drizzling endlessly. Noons,
melancholy brochures,
as dingy men flick the thought
of humanity from their shoulders,

and the neighbors, a noisy crew
on their way to dying
light at the end of the day.
They're single filed, to bunks stacked
like bodies in open pits,
where sleep is a dead sleep.

The Kaddish pours grey flakes of song,

And " It's just factory dust
coming out of their stoves."
we told ourselves,
sleeping safe each night
in our own pass-over.