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After Auschwitz
I am vague I am hazy I am indistinct
I am bodiless-
but my black Romani blood river runs
boils and bubbles and
pushes up Piotr’s daisies
I am faceless-
but my non-Aryan features glow searing hot
my crippled mouth and communist eyes
coal to cinder
fuel to Himmler’s furnaces
the fog of my Jewish bones
blurs Wladyslaw’s farmhouse
my homosexual tongue a licking lapping flame
a hideous gape, a burning yawning mask
my embers smolder in the wake of the Zyklon B
that fumigated my lungs
and left me breathless, voiceless, mute.
Silent.
…so I am nameless…
I am vague I am hazy I am indistinct
Write me, Paul Celan
-your neighbor from Czernowitz
Write me, Nelly Sachs
-your neighbor from Berlin
Write me, Miklós Radnóti
-your neighbor from Budapest
Give me a body and fill me in and grant me life.
Birth me-
for oblivion awaits
Birth me-
lest I disappear
from the awareness of humanity
into the amnesia of history
…vapor and ash…
Adorno was wrong - there must be poetry.
Write me.
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"After Auschwitz" first appeared in Voices Israel 2015 and was reprinted in Shirim Journal (August 2019).
This poem is included in my chapbook from Finishing Line Press.
You can order the book on Amazon.com or here:
Windows and a Looking Glass by Deborah Kahan Kolb