Archive
10/01/12
Coal-Blooded
Not quite overnight And yet not quite with the visionary insight of a seventy-one-year-old, You arrived at quietus's wartime cellar door Or, more precisely, were poured down the coal chute, Into the basement bin adjacent to the roaring crematorium, Where a Kapo kept perpetually busy, Stoking the ever-depleted, increasingly replenished supplies Of carboniferous Jew fossil fuel, Into the flaming dragon's maw-jaws, to be completely consumed, Metamorphosed into black clinkers robbed of oxygen And into scattering shadowy ashes drifting up a chimney stack Crowded with so many cacophonous groans and moans That it resembled the Old Testament Tower of Babel, groping for God.
Only, you never quite arrived at Germany's mid-forties Kellertür, Couldn't quite qualify as a Nazi Thousand Year burnt offering, On the Third Reich's Holocaust pyre, for one irrefutable reason: You, being a first- and only-born son of two resurrected Jews, Arrived way too late and in a nation way too far away, A second-generation survivor whose Austro-Hungarian parents, Liberated, by the Soviet army, from Auschwitz-Birkenau, Met in a displaced-persons camp outside Marseilles And conceived you, in '46 or '47 (neither of them could ever remember), Carried you to America, to East Flatbush, then to St. Louis, Where you grew into a boy curious to penetrate their silence, An adult poet eager to know their secrets, Bequeath them, with your verse, a decent reprieve from their curse, By creating orderly interpretations as to why it all happened, How such civilized people could descend to such fanatical exactitude. But even you, after sliding down the cellar chute, so many times, Can't transform such coal-blooded horror into comforting metaphors.
10/01/12
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