Bring Back the Children

The barbed wire enclosure bristles.
A gaunt gauleiter looks on. He is amused.
He laughs,
As he shoulders his cold steel steps.

Red blue eyes start bleeding
From sad songs
And lost words of last testaments.
Red blue eyes bleed
From dank, deep desolate dirges
Of sad children’s songs sashed in rags--
Hidden in last year's religious guises.
There is rage and fright
In the eyes of fresh arrivals
Who seek lost transparent ghosts
Melted down to warm wax
That spreads new stains on brick kiln walls,
Washed by clean daily blood,
Once so pure,
As petals on white roses,
Churning grey cement
To joyless red;
Promised pledges are lost
On page one of a Family Book.
Fresh-fruit promises fade remorselessly;
They hang from broken trees
‘longside haughty smoking stacks,
Substituting soot and grime and stench
For a lost laughter in children's eyes-
Fleeing this drunken stable of broken promises
And unfulfilled dreams.


Help!
Lead the children ,
To a cold thin stream
Standing sentinel in the dawn.
Show them views of life
And last reflections
Of unsurviving, quick-sand genes.


Pause!
Help search for minutes
Of those long lost lifetimes;
Aeons of thoughts lost
And packed in thin air
Around fine ashes
Once so far scattered,
Now lying lost
In the strokes of dead lead pendulums
In a disused suburban mall.


Don’t stare at your thoughts.
Walk on by,
And pray in soft undertones of grey;
Hear a last goodbye echoing to nowhere,
Kindling with soft salt tears
For warmth,
Forever staining cheeks
With the unwashable joyless tears
That coagulate again, indelibly
'gainst the gauleiter’s-mason's steps,
Leaning lazily and drunkenly
In a forgotten, dissipated warlord's
Unused blackened broom room,
Nestling with his mixed eternal curse.
The long-gone children seek him.
They want back a little bit more of life.
If he will trade,
They will be forever, eternally grateful.


In remembrance of the brave children who perished in the dastardly camps.