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sullivanthepoet.com
Member
since 2007-06-28
Posts 154
Devon, England

0 posted 2008-11-06 10:40 AM



‘Thieves Of The Holocaust..’


The Star of David, bright sulphur yellow, squats
forlorn sentinel, jealous and bitter,
aguard its pile of filthy and coarse striped hempen rags;
Tatters; Spilling and bursting forth,
like a magician’s gaudy paper bouquet,
from a battered and bloody cardboard prop.
A dirty brown and faded memory of a child’s suitcase;
Un-remarked and unremarkable.
And yet, set fetter against its broken and rusted tin catch,
a piece of fray ended silken entrail...
Necktie, come noose, come girdle, bright still
in its gaudy rainbow Alma Mater.
A morbid and distant echo of the Vienna Konservatorium.

A gold earring rattles in the bottom of a chipped enamel mug,
as it rocks; Back and forth, forth and back.
Its handle drumming ever more gently
against the side of a soiled and crumpled cardboard box.
Beating its gentle requiem, adagio, to a close.
‘Horadam unt Schminke’. Kunst Lieferungen...
The torn and dirty label, rent above the address and
screaming silently at a broken world.
Flecked here; Cadmium. Spat there; Cobalt.
Chrome, a splash, in mock satire of the ‘Juden’ star and
all vivid on the cuff of the filthy scrap that was once a sleeve.
Puckered and protruding now from the wet and pulp weak
broken corner of its corrugated coffin.

Creased and spine broke; The cheap exercise book
lays open where it cast, atop now the heaped and bundled clothes;
Clothes that even in their filth and fade and disrepair
stood the last of a man’s true possessions. His dignity.
The sin black ink, diffusing and spreading, blue and purple;
Runs from the rain wet page in panicked and headlong flight,
seeking refuge, sanctuary, from its philistine tormentors.
Soaking the hand written script, made untouchable
and for all time, into the smooth blood stained concrete.
Tattooing with each purple droplet the mark of Cain
deep, indelible, into the very souls of its oppressors.
“Opowieść o” were the last words to succumb;
To take their silent message, drip, drip, drip, to their grave.

Hair oil proofed and impervious from three decades of wear
the inverted and discarded yarmulke rocks gently;
rolling with each new raindrop as it fills to overflow.
Like God’s own hands, cupped full of holy water,
it slips and slops; broaching its hand embroidered rim;
Spilling its bounty onto the mud smeared bundle it crowns,
all tied about with its own legs and sleeves.
Its yellow faced accuser twitches nervously,
cavorting with each new pitter pat as it hangs,
like a gallowed traitor, dancing by a single thread.
The book under the pile, sheltering its fragile pages,
peeps a cautious corner... Марков. цепь теория
In educated pencil on it’s bespoke brown paper suit.

Patient and attentive beneath the vulgar cloth stain that hangs,
all dandelion yellow and ham hand crude in its stitching;
Sewn rough and swift and careless like a post autopsy cadaver.
A child’s clothes. Pink and pretty and petite, neat and waiting.
Sat like pretty pink icing. Bright and intricate and little girl loud
on the birthday cake of the drab and threadbare bundle
on which it perches in anticipation of its candles.
All the inherent potential of a lost people - in a cerise pinafore frock.
A piece of yellowed paper, rough torn from a cheap note book,
lies close: A confidence, a whispered tryst tween the dowdy pile
and its glistening concrete companion. Plastered now to the wet ground
and in a woman’s careful hand...“Poeme De La Guerre.”
The raindrops begin to stain now: Soot flecked and dirty...

“THIEF!” Thief the man and thieves his lackeys who took,
wanton and reckless, from this world and all worlds, those lives.
Their treasures; Each precious and delicate and irreplaceable art.
Stole them: Sinful and wilful and murderous in their dogma;
Took them from all the generations, then and now and for all time!
Away the unwritten symphony that will never be given tongue;
The paintings that will never live to bring tears to an awestruck eye;
Gone. The novels that will never see paper or rise to inspire us;
Taken from us; The original thought, the theorem, the mind,
that might, in fruit, have begged mankind stride the universe.
Lost... The poems that might have once taught our blind to truly see;
And squandered, that young life. The little girl in the cerise pinafore,
whose granddaughter might have borne the new Messiah...

“THIEF!”  

© Sullivan the poet 2008

www.sullivanthepoet.co.uk

© Copyright 2008 Sullivan - All Rights Reserved
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