This crisp, glistening December morning, As he drives away from the City, His eyes rise Through thousands of chimney flues Spewing innocuous plumes of gas-furnace heat That condenses to white smoke on hitting the air. He imagines myriad anonymous spirits Going about their routine business Of wiping Sleep’s hallucinations from their eyes And slipping into necessary disguises As they cake fresh makeup over old layers Or stretch facial masks into place Before donning sheep costumes appropriate to jobs Each performs with soulless zealotry.
He sees them, the entire herd, Languishing in a collective shower, Dressing, then driving in their cattle cars To work on Death’s assembly lines Fabricating ashes designed by inhuman beings For human ghosts to use throughout their lives Floating from limbo to Limbo Below God’s boneyard between firmament and Eternity. That he’s been gifted with these powers of insight Doesn’t make him privileged, just chosen; He’d sacrifice anything but his faith To drive by winter-bound houses like these Without remembering Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz, Which he almost escaped fifty ice ages ago.
Use the player below to listen to Louis Daniel Brodsky read this poem.
Summary:
This book, dealing with Holocaust victims, refugees, second-generation "survivors," and today’s family, is narrated by an American Jewish poet, son of neither victims nor survivors, who does not presume to speak for the dead but rather to the living — one human plea for universal peace.
Praise:
One cannot but respond with deep emotion and affection to the anguish and pain one finds in your poems. Granted, words are often unable to express the ineffable; but isn’t poetry the art of transcending words? — Elie Wiesel, winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize and author of Night
These magnificent poems are an assault on our complacency, our sleeping memories. Every line . . . reminds us that each of us died in the ovens of the holocaust. . . . Brodsky’s poetic voice is a haunting, anguished triumph of memory over evil. — Stephen B. Oates, author of With Malice Toward None
To read Charles Adès Fishman's interview of Mr. Brodsky, about his Holocaust writing, please click here.
