Quaint from a Distance
By MaggieG
- 642 reads
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.