Archive
05/01/12
When They're Gone
Though he knows he won't be here, in another eight or ten years, And he knows that it won't make any difference, anyway,
And though he knows, as well, that, for the past sixty-seven years, He really hasn't been here, either (not, at least, in spirit),
He wonders what civilization, mankind, the planet will be like, When the last survivor of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question dies,
When not one human being possessing an IBM-inspired tattoo Will raise his or her arm and expose those gruesome blue-green numerals,
Not a single person in Jerusalem, Buenos Aires, New York City, Miami Will be asked to "testify" at a synagogue's Shoah commemoration,
Not a solitary soul will remember being berated, upbraided, intimidated By a Brownshirt, Gestapo agent, uniformed, jackbooted SS member,
Boasting, flashing, brandishing his mythic, perverted swastika insignias, Asserting his snarling Nazi, Aryan Über Alles superiority . . .
When, finally, finally, all those enemies of the Third Millennial Reich Will have perished from the German Vaterland, Poland, Earth,
Leaving, in the wake of the twentieth century's scurrilous exterminations, Only the visible remains of heinously named necropolises —
Sobibor, Auschwitz, Majdanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka — And only the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators and victims
Will be accountable for letting history's evil deeds forget themselves, Relegating the Holocaust to the concentration camps of museums.
But what terrifies him is that when all the survivors have turned to dust, The Shoah will wander off, into a nonexistent desert, and die.
05/01/12
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