I will close the door, and soon
I will be left all alone again, me
and the photographs, the cold
expressionless walls that speak
only in silence.
To their liberators, the children
showed ink-pierced numbers, and
they laughed, and they sang. They
didn’t know that the needle’s tingle
will linger with them until
their tomb, that the scar will still
throb sixty years afterward.
They walk away, one by one,
my comrades,
from the face of the earth,
their numbered arms tumbling
in eternal cosmos with them,
disappearing like their fathers
and brothers in gas chambers.
One day, a German soldier gave
us a leg of pig: a leg of pig, a leg
of pig, and the blood broke in
our bald fingers, until the smell
of farms and potatoes, and freedom
penetrated our noses. A leg of pig:
just the sound makes my mouth water,
and yet we left it there to rot,
as God was our witness.
They say that the flag of Israel
has two blue lines: one for sky,
and for water, from Genesis;
and God divided the heavens from
the waters below. But these two blue lines,
one on top, one on bottom,
are the lines that slice our father’s cheeks:
Thin filaments, wrinkles that, like scars,
can only pass with the pain.
