Dachau

Glass-eyed watchtowers haunt my dreamscape
late winter cold cuts like a blade
laid taut against the throat.
A world of straight lines sharp angles meticulous-
scored lines on the blinding horizon.

It is bleak
It is bare
great howling searing emptiness
pressed into freezing prison corridors.
There are ghosts in the bars, the peeling paint, the high windows
endless door-tunnels shrink as they regress
world upon world, overlapping grey stories.
Heavy silence hangs low in uniform trees.

Over the deep grassy ditch
and cold fast-flowing water
stands a little red brick building, a school? A church?
Placards tell. They waited here, undressed here.
Bold black print BRAUSEBAD and suddenly we know-
look at each other, understand, and enter.

So tiny, so dark. Rusted shower heads
death-vents, a sadist’s peephole
and furnaces still full of pale ash
like crumbled dry fragments of dreams.

How to process, how to accept
that this was here, this was then, not so long ago?
Marching to death and they did not know-
they did not even know.

And those who did know and said nothing
believed themselves helpless, thus making it so
gates cast open, wept bitter tears.
And the fathers, mothers, sons, daughters
doctors, authors, lovers, now strangers
just another twisted corpse, a vacant face, ashes on the wind
white and bare like pale dead trees.

We clasp hands like children, now
seeking solace in meagre warmth.
But
how can people have ever done this to others?
How can papers passports postcards
outlive people?
Like blood-imbrued soil, it’s too much to absorb.

How can a murder scene seem so serene
when the river once ran red
and the sun sank low over the ant-men
hanging its head in shame?

What remains? A courtyard, a blank space
one red candle at barrack 11
the only colour in this mute underworld.
Blanket of snow, make this tainted city pure again.

From your ordinary life, take a train
and force yourself to see.
You can write out your pain
You can return to normality
but they never could
and they never will.
Turn a blind eye no longer
for wilful ignorance spells disaster
and silence can kill.

‘Never forget’ begs the memorial.
To this promise we stay true.
Because, now, it is all we can do.