Petr Ginz

Petr Ginz

It is a foggy day in Prague;

The fading of the Jews begins,

begins with a sign, a branding:

black-and-yellow stars of David;

On his walk to school, Petr counts

sixty-nine ‘sheriffs’ with badges.

Petr Ginz is a star shining in darkness;

He sees seeds germinate in mud and scum;

colours a visit from prehistory;

laughs cannonballs of explosive satire;

Caged Prague streets are his fairytale of stone;

Before any soul has rocketed to space,

He draws Moon Landscape, earth seen from the moon;

Moon rock heaves mountain peaks in linocut.

It is a foggy day in Prague;

Death hovers over the Vitava;

Normal time fades in the ghetto;

Jews are starving to skeletons;

no fruit, geese, poultry, cheese, onions;

Tobacco rations are verboten

to prisoners, madmen, and Jews.

Petr logs the calamity.

He records in yellowed notebooks:

The people fade away, hundreds,

And then thousands, gone on transports:

Levituses, Poppers, Mautners;

One August day he barely notes:

‘In the morning at home.’

Petr is sent to the ‘spa town’,

Transit camp for the death camps;

His mind is still an adventure;

Reads, writes, draws, paints, carves linocuts,

Edits a secret newspaper;

He is sixteen talent-rich years

He is gassed in Auschwitz.

1 February 2003:

On Petr Ginz’s birthday, death

Flies the shuttle Columbia;

Ilan Ramon, carries with him

A copy of Moon Landscape. 

Hungary calling

The evening sun heels over behind the hills,

projects a shadow that smoothes them to sandiness.

The beckoning arms of timber have disappeared

from the slopes above the road where refugees tramp.

In Hungary’s bloodlands Eichmann found willing help;

The arc of the moral universe bent away.

Now refugees face razor wire and stark rifles.

Why do evil to these persecuted people?
The weakest ask Job’s question and limp like Jacob.

Sanctuary light

In the leaf-blurred light the glint of stream gurgled rocks.

The green grass glowed in a fire-gold circle of sun.

Your hair glossed black as jet as you struck a match.

Smoke from the flamed twigs drifted like a desert cloud.

Your breath passed mine in our yearning to borrow words

to relive those knotted moments time can't measure,

for a miracle of finding air, water, fire, 

earth to regenerate the elemental real.

Our desire to consecrate pulled the Mayday taut

before it slipped as if it might never have been;

It distilled these lines, remains within them crystal.
The crushed coke can winked like a sanctuary light.

Friesian

Cups clacked on saucers, logs snapped and gulped fiercely fizzing flames,

and the cat settled on an upended hat on the couch.

Slumping in his great coat, he hunched into the grainy snow;

The chill stung his nose red and the snow crusted his hat white.
Skulking into the black of the hay-floored slated lean-to,

the old tan collie implied she had better eggs to suck.

He looked like a horse hanging his head out of the hard wind.

He did not waste words or talk when he’d rather be silent.
He would buck even blasting blizzards to check his cattle.
There was the soft sound of rubber boot-heels scuffing the snow.

His steps potholed the piled-up drifts duning the sunken lane.
The shawl of whiteness in clear air put him on a fine edge;

then his beard-stubbled cheeks paled and his squinting eyes clouded:

A branch of the felled tree had pierced the cowshed’s iron skin.

Now a meat slab the cow had a gape where her face had been.

The herd stood easy in their stalls, side-jawing, chewing cud.

He cuffed his hat back on his head, staring at the Friesian.
Summer after summer she had been his best milk yielder.

The snow had the yellow of melting when he buried her.

.

Thought for Today

Pink custard clouds hang from a high brilliant-blue plate.

The angel of devastation eases stock-still.

The sun retracts its question; dawn doesn’t answer.

The west is an abyss that might swallow us whole.

We function in sentences like Swiss-army knives.

But time will clip the wings of the goddess of storms.
The truth is: We are safe in a rock-solid house.

We’ll heat pasta and prawns and pour a glass of wine.
We have not been condemned to death by apathy.  
We claim a life worth living, a worth life-giving.

The truth is: Children huddle in blistering boats

That might burst to bits on the Mediterranean.

"You don’t put children on the sea unless it is

safer than the land." We must save the children now!
Assure them worth life-giving and life worth living.

Mackerel day

The morning lay like a grey cloth

discarded by dirty hands;

The grey-blue mass of the ocean

broke into surf on our toes;

The whelk-reek of glistening rocks

closed the sides of the world in.

The dogs sulked in the heaviness;

Waves salmon-leaped up the cliff;

A boat cut through the crested swells

pulsing, beating, to the shore;

The fisherman’s shouts brought baskers

bare-footed to the tideline.

Spoiling in the oppressive heat,

swimming seagulls' frenzied air,

silver bellies, black stripes, grooved fins,

deep-forked tails, green-blue dapple,

gleamed mackerel iridescence.

They school now through memory’s tide.

Erased

The hill does not look civilised;

It has gone back to wilderness.

Red-clawed hunting beasts must rest here;

A bubbling spring lets them water.

The vegetable garden lies

trampled by hoofs, flattened by time,

blurred under a dense mat of weeds.

Birds flit-flash among the willows.

A knocked stone wall, fringed with bindweed,

once shelved a terrace to the front.

Tense solitude haunts the fired house

with something aged past memory.

Suspicious eyes stare out at you,

surprised that after all the years

you would stand peacefully still here.

At the top of the hill the wind

robs your breath and deafens your ears.

There, a pall hangs over time’s head.

Memory slips into time

Time clouted hard through the marshy valleys,
the sun’s risings and settings,

the moon’s waxings and wanings.

Once she wished the moon pause beside the hill.

In the snow she’d fired the Fordson’s crankcase.

Then the crank-pulled tractor broke

her right shoulder out of shape.

She cursed its poor traction in the deep snow.

In times of leavened hope she built the farm,

churned butter and pressed cider,

grew crops, pastured cows and sheep;

Her disappointments were crosses shouldered.

She helped the hardcases who robbed the bank,

fed them food in the hill field;

A lit jailhouse with locked cells,

her mind had depths they did not look into.

The shower tinkled in the stone horse trough.

Life’s page yellowed brittlely.

Memory slipped into time,

like a swallow flying by her window.

Her death was an ice sliver in their hearts.

They remained in the graveyard,

neither talked nor cried nor stamped

their boots frozen into flat white paws.

Fall of grace

Fighting the winter fall of grace,

Spring had greened the sheep-grazed hedges,

blued the cold lake in the mountain

battered into a shapeless hat;

The grasslands fell flat to the west.

The twisting stream-rush beat their ears.

The river slid to the lakes.

They filed up small as grubbing ants.

The pull stronger than gravity,

They lugged themselves to innocence.

But somewhere a serpent glided:

Gunshots growled out in the valley.

A body dumped in vengeance

stained the wood below with blood.

Gang honour is the coin of thieves,

Homeric hard on human hearts.

Shucked clean, they’ll learn about life now.
The paradise of Cain can’t stand.

Minds the canal

The sun fells the trees into long shadows.

He stands staring with unreadable eyes.

Everything in the land speaks to him.

He remembers barges like floating jewels

braceleted in flow under a blue ease,

broad horses lumping along the towpaths,

the locks filling in a tremor of light.

He remembers the bridges stone by stone,

Granite and limestone sparkling slap by slap.

Now the bridges hump over chokes of slime.

Water hens question with their shocking cries.

Lanes rush dryly over the slugged canal.

No bargepole can fend off the melt of time.

But his barging past stays present to him.

He reveres the waterway though it cannot trump
the wrack of time. For it is not all gone.

Eel man in Enchalon

Feet on the drawbar of his Ferguson 20,

aching left hand holding the pale grey mudguard wing,

I listen to him describe a hen harrier

holding the dimming sky up over Eshbrack bog,

how the light plays on wet weathered shale, on deer sedge,

cowberry, ling heather, hare’s-tail tussocks, and moss.

Drumlins of clouds slidder across the skim-iced sky.

Breakneck winds pierce and prune hedges, hawthorn and gorse.

Tricky sunlight splinters on white silk cotton-grass

Gleaming like one-night snow. We skirt sheep-ford river.

His mind’s a water-hen in the lakes of Bragan:

Bradáin where he ate the salmon of knowledge;

Na Bléine Báine where plights of love turned to gold;

Loch an Aoire where his leap-dive splash stained the moon.

He'd caught ice-age lamprey and smooth white-claw crayfish,

and griped at glibbery eels in Blackwater mud.

Poaching pike on Emy with a cut hazel rod,

with a brave-sized hide strip of rabbit’s tail as bait,

he'd hooked an olive lump, an eel’s head in its gut.

He remembers the breeze pawing the dimmed waters.

And oar-rippled waves sucking the planks of the boat.

He knew the beds in Emy lough where once pike lurked to pounce.

The plashy lough lap-lies in a fen-fringed hollow

between whaleback drumlins, where a sudden stern curve

of wood backs from the shore; there in the fearful fen

of willow hides an unseen dragon none talks of.

Willow, which helped to cure Assyrian fevers,

holds the bank against swollen wash-away waters.

He wants me to see the silver eels climbing falls,

gleaning the moon’s last light with their gleaming fins.

A curlew flies over a peaty scraw-fringed lough.

His eye catches the down-curve of its slender bill

in its act of becoming a long-legged wader.

This gyres his soul to speak of Greenland White-fronted

Geese on Glaslough lake, of blue-grey hook-billed Merlins,

and trilling Red Grouse. Now the tractor soodles on.

The moon's dance in the mirror defies diffusion.

He lived among the green silence of moorland grass,

and the rising glass-sheen of mirroring loughs in rain.

In his eel-mud mind Emyvale was Enchalon.

Dawn time

The day holds its breath: the dawn’s tide fronts the night’s ebb.

Spilling light like golden Viking helmets,

Bright roused rays muster beyond the sea’s horizon;

Piercing night’s defences, they charge the swells and troughs.

Lulled away by light, night has loitered long enough.

Shadows shrink sneeze-fast in the tang of salty air.

The lichen on the duirling boulders blushes sun.

A mist as cool as ice-dust lingers in the trees.

A stubby-beaked blue tit lisps among the furred leaves,

upside-down, twittering grey, blue, white and yellow.

A sleek brown stoat with a black tuft at his tail tip

sears after a rabbit who swirls to the sand dunes.

The peaty lake holds an apparition of sky.

Blending with the green, gold and rufous blots of time,

Lost in the primeval womb-flow of breaking dawn,

A fisherman stands still in the ephemeral.

June day

Unusually for June the day had

a single shadowless skim-milk pallor

under a hazy beam of shifty cloud.

The huffle-whiffle of sudden ground gusts

lifted the sweet-and-sour swathes of tossed hay.

Geese tootle-blabbed by the slubbery pond.

With faintly a friggle a heron

gullocked down a fat frog.

In the hollow farsed-fat grizzle-grey sheep

grazed puckles of pool-slush green grass.

Luke sat on his gray Ferguson 20.

His face was set like the tip of an iceberg

He shouldered the weight of a solid thought

He had to share with me.

In China a small farmer who sold

his vegetables in the local market,

always carried home in his hand

a big heavy bucket full of dung.

He divined that humanity feeds on itself;

Its dunghill is its daily sustenance.

The hook of a hawk slashed into a spiral

down to wing-clapping green-necked woodpigeons.

The monotony of milk waiting in creamery cans

Glazed the look of the day into a smooth surface.

‘Bad News’ Sam stopped to say Farley’s youngest

had been kicked in the head by a horse.

His fleer-lipped flew-cheeked gargoyle face pursed.

No nature shone from his miser-purse eyes.

His stretched leg eased the creases in his pants.

He had delivered the bad news first.

He asked ‘How many beasts went down in the test?’

He cycled off holding a swede by the greens -

Robespierre displaying a guillotined head.

I was conscious of a gnaw in my belly.

And the hum-bizz of a bike of bumble bees.

A mallard lands in Rossmore Park

Black, like a spacecraft after a fiery entry,

the duck, neck outstretched, wings short-span, landing-gear up,

daggers through the air, crossing the tusky redwoods.

His fast wings beat defiance against gravity.

Then like Iris riding the rainbow-circle tube,

He curves his wings forward cupping the drag of air.

Now his image self-develops as he arcs down:

His legs reach red forward, his head lustres round green,

His speculum blue-purples, his chest blunts chestnut

His yellow bill pierces the steep line of the arc,

The feathers tipping his wings spread and separate,

and his bomeswish body sways falling fast to ground.

He slows with the water of the lake just below him;

He lands in a blink-spray of bright watery lights;

The flung-up flash falls into out-rippling circles;

In the concentric he floats as though always there.

We meet for a walk after twenty bereft years.

Will we land and talk as though always there, or go

round and round, awkwardly, in concentric circles?

Threshing

Evening shines waning green and reddening gold.

Singing its light-spraying stone-song, the flat-stone stream

trembles its clarity as we work on nearby.

My ear defenders block the jewelled flow of sounds.

The heavens take the haze from the thresher’s engine.

And as the tank takes grain from the auger’s helix,

the noise takes the sounds of the birds picking the fields.

I thirst - deaf Odysseus on his tortured raft.

From the old rickyard I see the big buck rabbit.

Hard-edged sunlight through the gape of doors clarifies.

The barn’s threshing floor is like the stream’s clear stone bed.

He huddles gathered listless into utter gloom.

Yellow-white viscous slime pusses his swollen eyes.

I lift him. He has lumps. His drowning lungs gurgle.

He trembles in mortal fear and then wets himself.

I live with the non-sense of unfeeling nature -

our bee-loved lime tree left a gale-storm’s broken bones.

But no lullaby words can soothe this away: Man

hid cruel horror in this buck’s gorsey wilderness.

Down, he burs behind the helve of a bezzled axe.

On his pain the gods of science look down unmoved.

Traces

Spiral snake-shaped ammonites with coiled-shelled chambers,

Sutured shell-caves in grey-blue mouldered muddiness,

Each bedded chamber keeps time for a being in life.

The polished marble of medieval cathedrals

is the klastos of coiled shells and fine-grained limestone;

Water snails scribble life on its masoned surface.

In Selskar Abbey the gabled buttresses rise

into pinnacles that catch the dawn’s herring-bone glow,

the sandstone stained red by the sun on desert dunes.

The straying stars are peepholes to infinity,

From where to judge the traces we leave behind us,

Evidence, telling as clay-fired pots in the earth.

We who are spits of clay from the potter’s wheel

hold shaped in our molten minds traces that heroise

doom-driven Homer’s sword-swishing blood-gorged ghost.

Yes: we have our vocabularies weaving art,

like the spume from the white waterwall plume bearing

a rainbow that gleams colours above the darkness.

On the soiled window of a deserted cottage

sits a cup of time’s dust layered with fine dry ash,

a trace from the chimneys of the red-flamed Shoah.   

Disappeared

In the cyan-blue ebb-lane of shore-shimmering light

Kids splash-kick the safe shallows into glass shivers.

Three tanned archaeologists caress sea-washed stones;

One thinks the pile might be ballast shingle lost from

a lone storm-dashed doomsday-driven Armada ship.

In the rolling fields they ploughed the potatoes out;

Pickers with buckets went up the rows filling sacks.

They threw away the ungirt sag-bags of squashed rot.

The moist pulp disappeared into the muddiness.

In the low damp dip the clay-clung potatoes had

to be scraped pink-skin clean from their cloggy cocoons.

In the marsh between the potato field and the river,

they found a ‘disappeared’ - his humanity burst

like a last-breath bubble on still bog-pool water;

In the hotel a country-and-western band plays;

The sun gashes red the wisps of white clouds curling

across the tug-boat moon that hauls the drifting tide.

The river eddies eat its bed and sides, rotate

pebbles in a vortex, and pukes them on the beach.

Spiders’ webs thread a white sheet on the grassy drills.

Gull strike

The boat kisses the lip of the damp dock;

Tide-washed tongues of thick rope bind them;

The fish-and-salt smell makes the wind’s mouth water;

Gulls fly white circles, pecking and screeching;

Here and there they hang in the wind solving

The riddle of flying while fiercely still;

One begins his strike through the air’s hollows;

He seems an aimless missile from the moon;

But his slow-motion whiteness has eyes-on;

A man dandles a burger in his hands;

The gull turns his head like a tank's turret;

He leaves shreds of bap and tomato sauce;

Shock wake and swoop see the man jaw-fallen;

Bereft, befuddled, he bawls out his bans;

Screeching gulls and tinkling masts drown him out.

Pebble and dash

Like the angel sounds of Sho pipes on the Silk Road,

Rays of light shone from the heavens - excursion day.

With gold-rush zeal we stamped headlong to the beach

on a quest for precious stones shaped from silica.

Sis wanted a pink rose quartz for her cabinet;

I looked in vain for waxy-grape chalcedony.

White chert is winter ice on gritty burning ground.

We raked through laminated schist and smooth-worn chert.

Dad said quartz crystal is a frosty-skinned beauty.

Mam asked, ‘What is beauty?’ Dad called her Socrates.

Mam wrenned out ‘We are all the stuff of common clay.’

‘We might all stop a hole to keep the wind away.’

Rolling two round pebbles, Dad crowed: ‘Hamlet’s balls!’

Waves banded like polished pebbles of sliced agate.

Suddenly a swallow skied in from the ocean,

Swooped blue-black gloss over the beach-gleam of pebbles

And flitted - a painter’s dark dash into primrose.

We sang our human souls like Hichiriki flutes.

We found our own raptures on stone-scraped tidal shores.

Quaquaversal

The east wind, pitiless as a falcon’s beak, scours

the bare tor-top clitter of cank-hard rubble rock.

She lies between the rucked earth and the faithful moon,

Her feeling bones on granite flesh-red with feldspar.

Skin membranes the mineral mind

that sees spiky-tailed stegosaurs

slub-slab-slup by limpid lagoons.

She journeys from the white fire-core, the plutonic,

sedimentary, clay, humus, grass, moss, plants, trees,

insects, birds, rain, snow, peaks, roads, water, villages,

roofs, satellite dishes, railways,

runways, space station - and she sees:

Hungry hell-harrowed huddled souls boat the abyss,

sniff Mediterranean air from Europe’s rocks

for the life-tang of liberty.

United by the sea bed

We morally connect

To refugees wheresoever.

Quaquaversal.

Reflection

The haze renders a single wash

of shapes - green, grey, white, fuchsia red.

The highest peak is the baldest;

Its flanks cool the valleys below.

A lark sings its psalm of summer;

Its song slips into the blue sky,

spills the notes along the heavens.

This last hill walk is the still point

round which the kite of sun circles.
The gouged track is indifferent
to the break that snaps our fates.
Time completes the final canvas.

When the sun shines, cold shadows wait;

Where joy grows deep, sadness takes root.

Dune creep

The great sand mound grew steeper still.

But sand-storms howled it unstable.

Then a section sheared from the slope.

The slope's angle change checked the fall.

Sand-falls slid into each other,

like the parts of a telescope.

Avalanche begot avalanche.

The boomings startled the desert.

The earth trembled in loud slow beats.

The rupture cut a straight slip-face,
sliced clean by the axe of some giant.

Sands blown over the brink fell there.

So extremities grew like limbs.

The winds compel the dunes to creep.

Brush

This brush had a nice point,

no splashes, no frizzle;

The curve of its goat hair

inked hei with evenness.

It leaves the red shrike-spots

in the purple tankei.

It will not rest again

on the fudeoki.

It had pride in its work,

knew a bristle removed

leaves a mark on the page.

In temple holiness

he thanks his goat-hair brush

for enduring the use.

The dawn composes birdsong.

A cat flings its body

into spring upside down.

Blossoms glow in the haze.
This morning he will run

his nail down the bristles

of his new brush,

turn the bristles between

his thumb and forefinger,

dip the tip in water,

press it to the paper.

Train station

The diesel train hurls into the black night ahead.

Its close lights stare straight, like the eyes of a serpent.

The station exudes a sense of dislocation,

a neither-world between the past and the future,

a track-side platform to pause the passing present,

where the plot of life waits for the door to open.
We pass blankly through the stop stations on the route.
Finally, alighting, we board our lives again.

Ripples

The riffled sand crumples the shelving shore;

The beach is sorted into toga folds.
Grains in the hollows are peppery fine,
coarse in the ripple crests round shaped like sine.

Possessing the same wavelength crest to crest, 
the ripples, parallel like desert dunes,
spread like the violent slap of a giant’s hand.

Crest and trough are formed in the flat shallows

where running wavelets play out the wind-fetch,

rocking the waters below to and fro,

sculpting hillocks and hollows by fluid-flow.

Over time the ripple prints have shifted.

A stone has left a Goliath too weak

to haul himself from the ocean vortex.

Lord-godding the earth

Winter winds strip harvest-fruit altars bare,

Purify the aisles where false idols park,

Uproot the bible-bonded graveyard stones,

Flick the snapped wires from the poles and pylons.

While we lord-god the warming planet earth,

Keep an eye out for Noah in his ark,

Swim upon the waters of the deluge,

Hope for a birch bark with an even keel.

You can’t improve Lear with an upbeat end.

Job said wisdom can’t be gotten for gold.

The weather cast doesn’t say what it should:

Earth festers under our dominion.

Orchard

They hail the 66 at Islandbridge;

The sodium arc-tube gas-lights the night;

The pulse of yellow stains the skith of snow

The distortion drains the blood from their cheeks.

They feel estranged, alien, not at home.

Home is the hedged earth they return to.

The apple trees dream sun in the orchard.

Their pith souls quiver through flittering leaves.

While the ripening fruit bends the branches,

The ash-racks stand set for pressing the pulp.

They look from the gable window that glows

with books touched by the words of wild places.

Living on land that has absorbed their kith,

they speak the language of ancestral fields,

bid time of day on felloe-furrowed lanes.

Hands wet with dough she touches the tree trunks.

She transcends to the gods of space and place.

She says apples come from Tien Shan forests,

borne to the valleys in the guts of birds.

along the roads from the place silk was made.

The apple took twelve million years by chance

to fall into their brown willow basket.

Like his fiddle’s G note it faces West.

He spreads used coffee grains on orchard ground.

When he dies she’ll mourn with the apple trees.

Spitfire pilot

He spent his life escaping the limits of earth;

Life to its full freedom could not be lived land-bound.

He rode the twilight in his killer-shark spitfire,

Its hunter’s head and fin in flying silhouette.

He saw the familiar as if for the first time:

A pillar of trees in a drilled wedge of ploughed field,

An arc of ruffled water rushing by a mill,

The snow on ridges showing the rib-cage of earth,

A vast tide of crashing fields rolling on a plain,

Where owls raked the shadows when the mice and voles ran;

Once, he gently wing-tipped a doodlebug off-course.

Once, he bailed out, his plane on fire, his nerve near gone.

Above the hill-tops below the moon of morning,

Wild vapour trails bent on death swept across the blue.

Fighters and bombers in sheer violent counterpoint.

Suddenly a black smoke trail dove towards the river.

Everyone scanned the clouds expecting fire to fall.

They searched for the white flowers of floating parachutes.

Fear froze life fixed frost-fast in a fragile moment;

Dead, he returned to the vast empty space of clay.

Turner's trough

The tumult’s rush headlong into swell tilts the boat
abaft the beam. Vast miles from where the wave-making

wind-fetch begins, bow-end first, we ride the ridges

of black eclipsing the long arc of horizon.

The sea heaves crested pyramids to the windward shore.

Our boat heels over in Turner’s nightmare trough of sea;

Its roll loses us any sense of the vertical.

A sharp water-peak shoots up where two wave-crests cross.

Pitched from the crests of passing pyramidal waves,

we seem to seek submersion below our Plimsoll Line.

But we rise showing the blue staysail triangle,

and wait for a square of sun to scorch us yellow.

The billows burst, the curl of cusps break, the light shines

 in bright beams through the white frothy spindrift and spume.

In the shelving shallow leeward shore ships are at anchor.

Closed-up waves fall, break, and lather sand in sudsy surf.

A red buoy holds the sea, ships and scudding sky together.

Veteran

The sun had tanned his face into taut lines.

His head had no memory of its hair.
His shirt still clung to its fading pattern.

Though he seemed to trudge the ruts of habit,

He liked the taste of the land on his tongue,

What a farm looked like, smelled like, sounded like.

He knew the weight, colours, feel of the day.
His fork prongs scribbled sentences of hay.

He’d put men butchered near a shallow stream -

By scared Balubas - in makeshift coffins.

But he never oversaid his Congo time.

He did arduous things his way with ease.

He spoke lightly of things that happen when

The hard hell on earth takes its daily turn:

The pain you can do nothing to prevent;

The heart’s lonely spasm of helpless dying.

He knew God leaves you in the wood to die,

Because God does not answer for the world.

He spent hours at abstract painting - it freed

His gaze from distorted humanity.

The bones of our dead paled at his nightmares.

But he watched horses with a child’s wonder.

As he lightly tapped his pipe on the gate,

His day clicked its end like a closing box.

Recipe for Plum Strudel (On reading In Memory’s Kitchen, A Legacy From the Women of Terezin)

Listen for a mother’s kind kitchen-aproned voice.

She recites her strudel dessert recipe of choice.

With one egg, fat and flour make ‘a dough’;

Under a heated pot to rest then it must go;

Use some milk to soak three rolls;

When very soft put them in a bowl;

Stiffly beat four egg whites into snow.

And have these ingredients ready in a row:

15 decagrams butter, one spoon of cinnamon;

30 decagrams sugar and the rind of lemon.

Add to the bowl and batter together well.

(Batter the mixture till you hear it yell!)

Stretch the dough but keep it thick;

Then spread it on your nut mix;

Sprinkle prune plums – noodle shape is nice

- about one-and-a-half kilos will suffice.

Roll the strudel and bake in a hot oven.

It comes out high, beautiful, neatly woven.

In Terezin, the starving women are ‘food obsessed’.

They savour the recipes their families possessed.

Mina Pachter says the love of cooking they share

Is purely platonic - their camp cupboard is bare.

‘Sie kochen zusammen oft nur platonisch

Zusamen geschmolzen die Vorrathe sind.’

For Cold Stuffed Eggs Pachter, her mind surges;

‘lasse der Fantasie freien Lauf’, she urges.

There are no words

to bring the women’s hunger

to our realisation;

It would take a descent

to a new harsh language
of lapsed civilisation.

European commodities (On reading Jan T Gross’s Golden Harvest)

Merchandising

Business was brisk in the market

At the edge of the Ponary Forest:

Shoes, trousers, coats, dresses, galoshes for sale;

Two navy coats cost one-twenty rubles;

A man asked for something for his wife;

The Shaulist found a Jew in the fourth line

Her clothes were near enough the wife’s size;

Marked for murder she did not need them;

Drinking vodka in the October cold,

The death merchants waited for the next truck.

Appropriating

Morning saw the peasants’ wagons arrive;

In Radzilow the throng filled the streets;

A bird’s eye view framed a town carnival:

A carnival of looting empty homes.

They had locked the Jews in a huge barn;

Jozef Ekstowicz and a pal doused

The barn with petrol and set it on fire;

His gran wanted one of the empty homes;

Godlewski summarily refused her;

She said her grandson’s deed gave her a right.

Benefiting

In Vitlich faces watched from windows

Even before the sound of breaking glass;

This happened on the morning after:

SA thugs beat the butcher Herr Marx

And threw him into the rear of the truck

Where five other battered Jews were bleeding;

They looted the place leaving little;

Frau Marx stood outside the shop her hands raised;

‘Why are you people doing this to us?’

‘What have we ever done to you?’ Silence.

Renting

Yes: Leaving the ghetto was verboten;

Shelter cost an arm-and-a-leg per head;

Food could be got at black-market prices;

The dark-blue police were ever hunting;

If the Jews were trouble you could ‘waste’ them;

Petelka burned a whole family;

Schmaltzowniks extorted for keeping stum;

They rented the victims their lives as long

As it was profitable to do so.

Hunting

In Siedliska the farmers bought scythes

At the local cooperative store;

‘You’ll need them for today’s roundup’;

The prize for catching Jews was vodka or sugar;

They took the clothes from still warm bodies;

They went to mass on Sunday where the priest,

The voice of authority in the village

Saw them in the murdered victims’ clothes;

He said nothing; though ‘the time will come when

These souls will have to be paid for’.

Arriving

A sixty-car train arrived from Warsaw;

The Jews had to wait their turn to die;

The locals sold them food and water;

Vodka and kisses got around the guards;

Cups of water cost one hundred zlotys;

Drunken guards had their games to play;

They would take money to let Jews escape,

And shoot them as they tried to run away;

The living dead filed up the himmelweg;

The bishops everywhere who knew were silent.

Dispatching from Treblinka

The train dispatcher checked the bundles;

The bundles were loaded into freight-cars,

The separate categories labelled;

Men’s suits, jackets, trousers;

Men’s tall boots, and shoes;

Women’s dresses, blouses, sweaters, hats;

Bundles of underwear, children’s clothes;

Swaddle clothes, pillows, cushions;

Suitcases: pencils, fountain pens, and glasses;

Separate bundles of canes and umbrellas;

Spools of thread of every colour;

Leather for shoes, bags and clothes;

In cardboard boxes: razors, clippers;

Mirrors, pots, pans, washbasins;

Carpentry tools: saws, planes, hammers;

Also shipped was shaved women’s hair;

The form recorded ‘military cargo’;

Most transports snaked back to Germany.

To ease life for the ordinary Germans;

It was patriotic to keep what was useful.

Digging: Post-war Kopacze

Diggers pose for a formal photograph;

Seven relaxed policemen stand with them;

They have been digging in the hilly soil;

Rowed in front are the fruits they have reaped:

Over twenty human skulls and some bones.

You cannot see the flesh or braids of hair

Of murdered Jews buried in the ash pits,

Or the teeth ripped from the jaws of the skulls

By locals gold-digging in Treblinka;

The harvested teeth will bleed forever.

Disposing

The Nazis sold the looted possessions

As bargains to the Marxs’ own neighbours;

One woman bought Frau Marx’s own pillow;

She knew for what she paid it was a steal;

But she buried the thing deep in a closet;

She could never bring herself to use it;

Years after the murdered millions she asked

What should she do with Frau Marx’s pillow;

But there was no redemption in disposal;

The Marxs had suffered a garbage death.

Otorge

The sun tattooed the chimney breast with dazzling light.

The clock ticked time as if there was no tomorrow.

She heard the cows bellowing and I had to check.

The morning choir was bird-light song singing sunrise;

The sun spread its skirting rays round the damp pastures.

Dew-wet cobwebs matted the stiff twinkling stubble.

The cart-way ruts ran with last night's rain down the slope

Into the bottom where worms drowned and ducks waddled.

How sure I walked the path and lane to the hill fields.

A fox floated on the banks of the Blackwater.

A kestrel hanging in the air let itself down

Level by level till it seized a green lizard.

Once in a lamplight sweep I saw a long-eared owl

Returning to the castle where young voices creaked.  

It flew legs behind when the mice began to run.

The castle wall returned my hoot in loud echo.

A willow copse sloped up the hill from the river

How sure I walked the banks to the busted castle.

Birds roused from their roost trees cut the air with long words.

A squirrel applied his fore-teeth to hazel nuts.

The cow-pond swelled from the full purling stream.

The solaced cows stood sipping, in the hotter hours.

And bats on the wing sipped surface insects at night.

Once flaxhole water seeped - left the fish belly up.

The old folk lit the dried-out rindless rushes dipped

in bacon-scum that burned brighter than wicked tallow.

How sure the stood boy who stole honey from the hives.

Season followed season, seeding to harvesting.

The pensile boughs of birch bared in an autumn drowse.

Beside the orchard where long codling apples grew

A busted cottage held bales of hay in its mouth.

Here, a keen north wind tumbled the treetops with snow.

Here, flowers-of-May blossoms kissed my face

Here, chill fog floated rime-frost spikes into my face.

Here, a clucky, feathers on end, flew in my face.

How sure I was the cycle would come round again.

Pigs waited lying relaxed on their straw-floored pen,

Taking turns in the wallow, waiting for slaughter.

On the dunghill beside the pigpen a trapped hind

Sprung her back legs and broke the neck of a beagle.

I walked the grassy path the old ones had bruised down.

Time has extinguished the path, for ghosts don’t tramp grass.

As if they’re not hers, the earth is hard on her brood. 

Lacking the heart of a hen, she devours her own.

Sunflower

I cannot explain this poem;

It means only what it says.

There’s landscape and atmosphere.

A sunflower under sunlight,

Spreads now its wings of green leaves,

Magnetising the hot sun.

Its petals roll down the hill

Like a fire-wheel disc of sun.

A verse flies off in the wind.

His mind swims

Whitish seams of sun search the overcasting gloom.

Sandals lie carelessly left on the deck-and-post pier.

The mud smell of lake water permeates the air.

Like the refuse of life, rods rest against the wall.

His mind circles the day; he grits his on-edge teeth;

The brown trout rise in the air; he gasps wordlessly;

They drink and sift the air; he loosens his silk tie;

They balloon and stream on poles; his dry lips tremble.

His pewter hair reflects the melancholy sky.

He stares at the trout swimming above the lake.

For now serene, as he inhales the wind-scrubbed lake,

His lost unpeopled mind swims with the bannered fish.

Cherry blossom

She waits: the cherry blossoms will appear,

Marking the end of winter’s bitter bite.

Cherry blossoms don’t last long on the bough,

Perhaps five days and the flowers are gone.

Spendthrift winds shave them off swoopstake like stars:

A brief sun-made shadow-net on the ground,

A celestial deadfall cast on grass.  

She walks: the flowers could fall before full bloom.

She works her stick, a spring in her short step.

Proud like a rose, the pale-pink tree greets her,

Waves its canopy gently in the sky.

She knows the rains have given it deep roots.

She has deep roots here, her will to survive

Shaped and smoothed like pebbles on a lake shore.

She shows the tree her bony worked-hard hands.

She says sand-grains fine down into silt flats.

Eighty years making a farm from mountain,

She walks the leaf-fall of long memory.

She had heart-longed for a passionate love.

Her parents chose a man she did not know.

She loves the stories the sakura tells.