“After Auschwitz,” said the man on
the TV,
“one simply can’t conceive of lyric
poetry” -
for the literal and metaphorical,
the physical and metaphysical,
all opposites, antitheses,
all antonyms on earth and seas,
all arguments and paradoxes under
heaven
have been baked in ovens without
yeast or leaven,
at a temperature of pure Davidian
degrees;
then iced with radiance of Zyklon-B,
and seared, vulcanised, the
somethingness made none,
till there is nothing, new or
ancient,
agreeable or disagreeable,
left under the sun.
Among the ashes, literally as well
as metaphorically, the sunflowers
grow.
Visitors complain about the smell -
the lines of visitors who move as
slow
as chosen people marching to the
showers,
their heads bent down exactly like
sunflowers.
The smell is bone meal, compost and
manure,
some natural dung unnaturally pure,
decomposing row by unmarked row
among the ashes of the northern
bowers.
Sunlight over Auschwitz is no less
beautiful
than sunlight over Chamonix or
Biarritz,
nor are the gardens any less
colourful
than Monet’s in Giverny, or the
blitz-
krieged beds at Kew. Tourists
seeking a brief
respite from the chamber of horrors
which is
History have been known to stroll
here, leaf
to leaf and hand in hand; and
Catholic nuns,
whether in black smock or coloured
britches,
kneel in idolatrous worship of the
sons
of God, the ones who outlived dead
Jehovah,
and reinvigorate the ancient rites
by fertilising lifeless soil,
turning over
the marriage-bed of earth, till
sunlight
has penetrated and overpowered
night.
In sleep your body lies as still
as that child I once saw in a film
about the camps, lying beside her
mother -
as close as one would lie beside a
lover -
in a carefully selected barrack bed.
She did not, I presume, survive. And
yet
there is no guilt, no sense of sin
in me, no hesitating to recall the
dead;
I am not one who says
forgive-forget.
Merely I touch your thighs, your
breasts, within
the deep embrace of flesh on flesh.
I feel
again the shudder of that movie reel
and close my eyes to make the film
expire.
Your legs wrap round me like a
blanket of barbed wire.
Sweet Yehudit, let us inhabit each
other’s body once again; let us make
a melodrama of our brief affair
(I nearly said “soap-opera” - ah,
words! Beware!)
Let us whisper schmaltzy
pillow-talk, teach
ourselves the sentimental way; let
us wake
up very late, and maybe pray the
morning
service quickly, then drive to
Warsaw. So we
shall tell the others how we heard
the warning,
how we alone survived, escaped the
strife,
understood that what must be must be
-
and got on with the tedious
banalities of life.
For wherefore did they die? For
eternal
mourning? For a thousand year vigil?
For
each of us to put on black, infernal
sackcloth, to bow our heads like
Auschwitz Jews,
to offer up in sacrifice still more
unconsummated hearts and souls and
lives?
No, Yehudit, this is the night of
the long knives,
on which we sever with our bodies
all the knots of History,
honouring the past, sailing the
Vistula
towards as-yet-unborn posterity.
Here on this mound of skulls I give
you kisses.
Here on this flowery grave make good
your wishes.
“After Auschwitz,” said the man on
the TV,
“one simply can’t conceive of lyric
poetry.”
The Romans said much the same after
Caligula,
and the Egyptians likewise after the
Red Sea.
"After Auschwitz" is published in "Welcome To My World, Selected Poems 1973-2013", The Argaman Press. Click here to purchase the book.
I am not entirely certain where I found the black-and-white drawing which I adapted, in colour, for the illustration on this page, and I have been unable to find it even after searching the entire Internet. The signature on the page is Argaman, in Hebrew letters; Argaman was the code-name of Bernhard Aaronsohn, hero of the Jewish Resistance in Poland in my novel "The Flaming Sword", which is scheduled for publication in 2015. The painting was one of a dozen "created" by Argaman while forced to work as a forger for Himmler in the Alt-Aussee, and exhibited in London in 1947.
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Copyright © 2014 David Prashker
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The Argaman Press
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