Remembrance: A Poem from the Holocaust

Published July 01, 2009 @ 07:55PM PT

Tonight I direct you to a beautiful collection of poems from the Holocaust I recently discovered, published at The Hyper Texts.

From a translation of Warsaw Ghetto poetry and poems by survivors of the Ghetto by Yala Korwin:

Remembrance

You saw blood of the homeless and innocent.
You heard the voices mocking them.
You saw a beast jumping out of the crowd,
Heard the laugh, looked into living eyes
When smoke enveloped the silence
Of other voices.

You came back to your homeland,
As one comes back to life. You see a flower
Growing in the fertile, too-fertile earth.
Traces of smoke become sky-blue, like a remorse,
The smell of burning disperses,
Even the shadows pale.

In the air – an aroma, like anticipation
Of new growth, of unknown words.
Chestnuts bloom, grasses are busy repairing the web
In the earth’s red wound.
Buds are sticky, water sinks into the bushes
And roars again.

Like tokens of pleasure and strength,
The nightingale raves in thickets of young trees.
Its song rises and bursts like fountains of light
Beating the sky. The earth’s beauty is unfriendly,
More indifferent, than inhuman mass-graves.
And if you become lost in the beauty of words,
As in an unseen face, their clean sound,
Too clean, will be outweighed by a mixture

Photo from the Berlin Holocaust Memorial from Flickr user plastictaxi.

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Comments (1)

Of earth and blood.

Posted by Luella - on 07/02/2009 @ 07:08AM PT
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Author

Martha is the campaign manager at the Save Darfur Coalition. She has worked with a number of organizations and institutions advocating against genocide, including Team Darfur, STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition and Voices for Sudan. The views expressed here are her own.