Archive
05/16/12
That Train
Tonight, sometime around the chug-chugging of dusk's dawning, I lost substantial track of the crack cattle-car express Transporting me, my identity, my spirit, and every last next of kin To the Baden-Baden–like spas, in the "east," way beyond the pale, As Poland was known, in those shtetl-settlement days of ours, When life was difficult, exhausting, raw, not comfortable Yet hardly torturous, terrifying, pestilential, death-ridden. Where that train finally stalled, after leaving my beloved Transylvania And passing through a transit depot somewhere in the Carpathians (From which we were sent to the baths beyond Germany, To "recuperate" from the hardships of peasant existence), I'm the last to say, though I alone, like Biblical Ishmael, Have lived to tell an elegiac tale of ignominious woe, Which I can't begin to comprehend, fathom, translate from the dead, Since none of my cheder training Ever prepared me for the atrocities I survived, at Auschwitz. Yet that crack cattle-car express still rattles in my nightmares' baffles, And I gasp, choke, collapse, from the smoke belching out its stack, Unable to distinguish its glowing coal clinkers from the human ash Spewing through the flues of those groaning chimney stacks Lifting above the roaring crematoriums, churning us into vapors That not even weeping oblivion was willing to let settle on its shores. After sixty years, I still hear, see, smell that train chugging toward me.
05/16/12
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