Who Can Hear Us Now?

How can we argue with empty hands?

We who have forgotten

how to smile, we whose blistered

tongues ache in bitter air?  Our mothers have ridden

down black rails, our children swallowed by mouths of brick.

We speak the language of bread.

We speak harsh consonants of thin broth, of turnips

and the vowels of tepid water and of rags. 

In this roar of silence we speak

in fragments, bits of cloth, some pieces

rolled together, pins, a kerchief, a torn

shirt or half a dress. 

Here in this barbed-wire rage, this electric hum

we speak, here in this smoke

and ash-stench,  living only

in what is left,  these sick and tortured bodies, these faces

we don’t recognize, living only

for the trolleys and the stones, living for the furnace,

the community of bones.

Who can hear us now?  Who can hear us when we cry?

Who can hear us at the last, opening for one final breath?

Who stands with us, silent, unseen, covering our nakedness

at the grave’s lip?  Who will answer us, what angels

lift us up?  What witnesses will rise through smoke

of our bodies, will gather ashes in shaking hands,

will rend their garments, tear at their hair, sing in the flames

for what we have seen?  Who will fill our empty hands,

who will speak through our broken mouths, who will raise our silence

in a communal cry loud enough to make blue heaven shake

and tremble in the thunder of our prayer  song  scream?

Smoke: A Witnessing

for my Grandmother Therese

who perished at Auschwitz, 1944

My mother speaks:

"Those not gassed

     directly from trains

those survivors herded

          naked in the cold

female Polish kapo sheared

     our hair, without soap or water

with crude razors, shaved

          our heads.

Looking at each other

     we barely recognized familiar

faces, distorted by fear.

Electrified fences, and touching

     meant instant death. Why

didn't we rush the fences

          and die?  To this day

I do not know.

Smoke stacks belching stinking

     black ash near the gas chambers,

darkening the sky.  Even then

          we could not believe.

I asked: When would I see my mother again?

     She went to the "other" side? 

Look at the smoke, someone said."

Two Angels

Two angels settle on the ground at Auschwitz.

It is 1944.

Black smoke boils and swirls in the air.

It soils their wings, their long, folded white wings.

Standing on the ground, shining through shrieks

of train wheels, beautiful and forlorn the angels sing a hymn of praise.  They weep

and sing.

No one can see the white angels, no one can hear

their song.

Not shrunken prisoners, not kapos, not

current surging through fences.

Smoke hears nothing, ashes have no ears.

Already they are lost, fallen from the Hand.

Already they have fallen too far.

Already their voices braid like trim on a golden calf,

its lovely golden throat garlanded, deaf

already raised to sacrificial blade.