Archive
04/30/12
Lessons and Promises
From four to seven, this blustery, rain-gloomy Monday twilight, Two public-school teachers and I have shared judging duty, Reading prose and poetry entries for the annual writing contest Sponsored by St. Louis's Holocaust Museum and Learning Center, Trying to arrive at a consensus that will satisfy the criteria Announced in middle and high schools, two states wide, The prizes to be awarded on a night of celebration for the winners.
Now, sitting with a glass of wine, at a nearby restaurant, To relax my strained eyes and weary brain, So recently steeped in the execrable atrocities of the Shoah, As filtered through the nonexistent experience of adolescents Inured to the sheltering independence that being American affords, Who can't possibly feel what it's like to be ostracized, Let alone ghettoed, deported, starved, shot, gassed, cremated,
All I can see is the irony, delusion, hollow optimism of the theme — "Lessons of the Past . . . Promises for the Future" — Despite it being moralistically, ethically well-intentioned, Knowing, deep in the ancestry of my glands, the ark of my soul, That no matter how fervently people pray for mercy, surcease, Nothing will ever change, to make race hatred go away, Usher in the death of xenophobia, intolerance, bigotry.
Why I continue to volunteer, year in, decade out, pain after pain, To read these awkward, naive, juvenile, if honest, attempts At defining, coming to terms with, cruelty, evil, irrationality, madness Must have everything to do with my surviving Bergen-Belsen, My being liberated into the land of disinterred orphans, My searching, searching, with hope beyond hope beyond hope, For a lesson to be learned from the past, a promise for the future.
04/30/12
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