Station

This poem was, in part, concerned with the murder of Gerhard Kretschmar, who in some ways can be considered the first victim of the Holocaust, in that the development of the administrative and technical infrastructure that facilitated the extra-judicial "final solution" of the contrived administrative problems arising from the implementation of ideologically driven policies in Eastern Europe began with his murder.

I wrote it a while ago but felt it was appropriate to share it on the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Day 2015. I am not convinced we have learned anything from history, and fear that if the same combination of circumstances arose again, the same outcome would result. I am concerned about very limited narratives that are offered about these events, well tell stories which absolve us of the crimes of our predecessors, and I see these limited narratives about this subject, subordinated as they are to the presumed demands of concision that arise due to some presumed hectic pace of modern life that apparently prevents from thinking about anything properly, everywhere just now ...   

Station

In the immaculate solitude,

                steam rising through the light into the soft night rain,

                the Solari board chatter mesmerising the obedient mob,

                who populate this perfect absence,

                distracted by pleasant fictions of origin and arrival,
                destination and departure, route and return,

                living their impossible timetabled lives

                beguiled by myths of choice and liberty,

                believing themselves co-conspirators

                in the reckless velocity of civilisation,

                while remaining all equally alien, unknown and apart,

                empty static separated shapes in this step-swept space,

                their dreams invaded and hollowed out by the pulse,

                fluorescent flicker and flat-chested billboard pout,

                of the city's robotic sexuality,

                leaving only a place in time and space

                an outline through which a stranger passes,

                a silhouette en route to a sepulchre,

I marvel at the secret revelry, the private pageant, of my loneliness:

                a little snail ekes out its tallow path alone on the polished floor,

                a devil-kissed discard, companion of dust,

                propelled by the blinding slow-motion spasm

                the ridiculous lifelong convulsion 
                of the single long slow sneeze,

                with which it mutely heaves itself through its life, 

                through the high dark brightness of my mind,

                tense, suspended in agony, the freeze frame

                of an unending angelic belly-flop,

                of a perverted, inverted keel-haul across the floor
                that encompasses everything it will ever know,
                every path it will ever take in the few hours it lives,

and as the hectic eclectic collection of strangers pass,

                curtsey, bow, and polka to the platform,
                in the movies of their own lives playing in their minds

                carrying their hopes and dreams to unknowable futures

                neatly wrapped in individual billboard boxes,

                imagined lives garlanded with fantasy,

                I must remember where I am:

                I am here, now. For in that thought

                I receive the announcement of love

                broadcast from all other isolations,

                from the destinations the Solari cannot articulate:

                                palaces and torture chambers,

                                spotlights and space flights, wombs and tombs,

                                from every coffin inhabited by memory,

                                every cavity that has felt the draft of our passing,

                and from those souls set free by misfortune:

                                born limbless and snail blind,

                                imbecile tongues tied and torsos twisted,

                                whom we weep with joy to behold

                                for their inviolable innocence,

                                the nutshell and infinite space

                                of their impenetrable imprisoned imaginations,

                                the garbled Morse of their transmissions ,

                                their orbits awkward, stumbling, retrograde,

                                mysterious and indecipherable to us

                                as the whispered pizzicato

                                of the gentle night rain on the skylight,

                                and just because we can't understand

                                does not mean they are not speaking

                                and we love them, sore for what we cannot know.

                I must remember in case I am left crying other tears,

the hard and arid tombstone tears of Lina Kretschmar

                letting grief for the wreckage of false gods

                tumbling from her womb

                outweigh love for the broken child,

                seething caustic tears slowly sucking dry the whole earth

                with withering ripples of desiccation girding the place

                where she drops her round stone squealing farrow from her eye,

                tears kilned and immured in hollow hearts, subterranean tears,

                burrowing and burying themselves like eager brick seeds

                that bring forth chimneys at the terminus

                stiff slender stems with steel rail roots that blossom with ash

                billows filling and stilling the thickening night,

                enough ash to clog every pore,

                smother every duct of feeling,

                until memories are dark shapes in the strata,

                shadows where the flesh had been,

                swift puffs of powder people

                passing through the perfect absence

                in this dreadful night that has no mother,

                this empty mother-shaped night of abandonment,

                this black-hot lead-lined box of dread that dumps

                its uneven weight upon the scales of equinox,

                tips the world's unruly embers into pits of melancholy,

                then pours its molten self away

as stinking tears sinking to fill the deep dark toxic aquifer of fire

                that brims beneath this city and fuels us still

                and burns every word I utter

                the instant my tongue prints it into speech,

                and flashes my tears to steam

                rising through the rain,

                to be lost with yours in the clouds,

                the clouds beyond the night sky

                                that dissolve our tears,
                                where we relax at last our grip on pain,

                                which we search through and illuminate with love,

                                and where we must finally lose ourselves

                                to be together with each other again,

so quickly take this tongue-pressed ticket to my heart

                while I'm still here

                                and make the connection.

Stowaway

This is a poem written on the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Day 2015

Stowaway

What should we do now?
Do our acts of remembrance
merely complete our amnesia?

At one and the same time

as we remember what we know was lost

do we erase what has been forgotten 

in the rituals of commemoration?

We only make room on our monuments 

for the names we remember.

Does memory also include the possibility,

at least, of what cannot be remembered?

At the memorial for what we lost,
the order of service, the list of the lost,

is a manifest that ignores the stowaways,
disregards the unregistered and illegal,
articulates what is a matter of record only
and, as it must, leaves what is unsayable

unsaid: on one hand we briefly touch
our outstretched fingertips to our friend's 

as they fall forever out of reach; on the other,
we didn't even know that they existed,
so perfect is their annihilation.
What other Adams crumbled back to dust
while God's Sistine digit reached out to us,
and in the end failed to stop even our fall?

But weren't we all stowaways once?
Rather than just remember
what must not be forgotten
- floral tributes solemnly laid
on the tops of stone monuments -
perhaps we should not forget to mourn 

the incalculable loss 
of what cannot now be remembered.

Unseal the tomb. See
that all we share with its occupant 

who stood next to us on previous occasions
is an emptiness that we can crawl inside
to curl up in alone, hiding 

in the borrowed shadows of their sepulchre 

on our own private journey 

in the vessel it makes for us. 

The waters we are embarked upon
are dark and unforgiving, grief strewn, 

and in the inevitable end

we don't know who else clings
to the wreckage in the night,
or who has succumbed already to the cold
to sink at last into their pit of private terror
without a trace, without ever being known, 
without even having the chance of being remembered.
The light of day does not reveal the depths,
it only reveals the debris, only the jetsam
around which we locked our rigid fingers,
as we turned ourselves into objects to survive,
the debris from which we now make
our grim reckoning of loss,
and delude ourselves we are better prepared
for the next storm,

for it is only in the limitless, inaccessible depths,
where the sunken bodies eventually come to rest,
that the truth is known.

So let us not just commemorate
what we know of our loss.
Let us remember
that we will never know its full extent.
Let us not pretend
we are prepared for the future,
all epaulettes and medals
mumbling pious voodoo at the helm.
Let us now think about
those now living that we overlook today,
and render assistance
to the refugee and to the stowaway,
no matter who they are
or where they're from or what they flee
and fill up to overflowing
now our empty memory
as the only way to make up
for what was lost without a trace.