Wasted Lives

Written for Holocaust Memorial Day 26 January, 2003

This is not a poem.
A poem would fly off like a kite,
would diamond shine the facets of it glory.

This is not a poem,
not a moment of wonder.
There is no Eureka shouting, no whispering soft Ah – ha.

This is not a poem,
onion layered, showing
slow unveilings of emotion,
the show that never tells, the message with a rhyme – or if not rhyme
a reason. These words do not love themselves, would prefer to be
silent.

***

December rained down lines of lamentations
turning streets to rivers, fields to lakes.
Sodden carpets now turned river beds
watched their prized possessions floating outwards.
Some people retired to the safety of their upper rooms,
some escaped by boat,
others gestured hope from roofs of houses.

High on our hill we heard the rain fall too.
The neighbouring field, a patchwork of puddles,
awaited the wellington splashes.
The wood was a forest of tears.
Even when the rain stopped the tears of the old Yew
kept on
falling.
Kaddish
Kaddish
Kaddish.

My hands were two rakes moving leaf mould mountains.
Each leaf, a fallen face. Each twig, a separate story.
Every cone sang the song of its pine.
Rolling back the leaves I saw the gold tooth-silver medal
of their shining. The blood and ribbon red of threads
revealed inside their veins. The browns were the browns
of young boys’ shoes cast out on a shoe soul mountain.
And the birds gave up their singing.

There were flood and severe flood warnings.
Windows battened their hatches.
The conservatory roof thought itself into a bullet shield
as the choking drains gargled back their slow death rattling of dirges.

***

All winter I raked through the leaves of pages.
Numbers showed themselves first.

One.
A prime.
One cat, one dog,
one mouth, one voice,
one human life.

Monosyllabic words
manipulated into scrabble games.
Race, bread, smell, sweet, gas,
War, crime, gun, corpse, mass,
State, rogue, rape, steel, sack,
Bush, hawk, fly, oil, rack.

Two.
Two eyes, two hands, two feet.
Two meanings for one number, for one fact.

A hurricane takes 10,000 American lives,
“A great human tragedy”
American bombs kill 10,000 people in Iraq,
“A medium Case scenario”

Am I innumerate?
Do these numbers make sense?

Am I illiterate?
Do these words hold meaning?

Two
Two syllables
Polpot, Stalin, Hitler,
army, rations, air-force, navy,
Naming, shaming, playing, killing,
minutes, silence, candles, wasting,
human horror, terror, harvest,
hunger, starving, swollen bellies
maddest
saddest
sadist.

Two was too hard to take in and so I tried a fraction.
1915, one third of the Armenian Nation were murdered.

Next
I tried an image.
If you kept one minute’s silence
for each of the victims of Auschwitz and Belsen
you would not be able to speak for another
two years.

Then
a quote.
(Nadezhda, Stalin’s wife, before her suicide)
You torment your own son, you torment me,
you torment the whole Russian people.
5 million Russians had already died,
many fell later in the purges.

Surely, in the year of my birth, this must have been
a happy place.
1960, 20 million people died in China,
forced into starvation.

It was then that I made a quick retreat
back into the trenches of fractions.
1989, East Timor, one third of the nation
died.

Too much.
It’s all too much.
Much safer to go back to syllables.
Let us find sanctuary inside some simple counting.

Three Syllables
history, incident, innocent, Chatilla,
suffering, refugee, remember, invasion,
holocaust, massacre, genocide, mantilla,
Lebanon, Vietnam, terrorist, evasion.
Wasted Lives
Wasted Lives
Wasted Lives

***

Naga-Uta
Naga-Uta.
Five for a Pentagon.
Seven for luck.
The rape of Nanking
was a harvest of sorrow.
Yellow butterflies
fly in hope of tomorrow.

Pity the Nation
for their tempests of error
Ukraine’s vast Belsen
all the harvests of terror.
Cannibalism
drives men to the shallow grave.
This moleskin notebook
digs words that will never save

the man who stares into oblivion,
whose blank life is counted in syllables
10

***

I have lost all will for counting.
I can not feel or taste the waste of lives
except in objects and in signs
and in

silence.

***

Hard rain is falling
disguising the sob of the
ancient Yew tree’s cry.

***

Pity the Nation. Pity the Man
who carries the gun of a grey suited plan.
Harvest of Terror. Harvest of Sorrow.
Playing fields yesterday, killing tomorrow.
The suicide bomb, the hate of Sharon.
The victims of gender and race who have gone
into graves of Anon and Anon and Anon.

We will remember them.

***

New spin, Newspeak,
we’re sick of News week.
Our Living rooms,
sick of political speak,
are rolling out futons
and laying themselves
down to die.

New age, new rage,
New Labour of love,
of love that is lost.
People who tasted
a real waste of life
are sick of the gang wars
the stone and the knife,
machete and bayonnet.
They bravely decry
all the crime as they sigh
‘Remember our daughters.
Please put down
please put down
your guns.’

***

They’re playing with numbers again
and the death toll will slide in the sleight
of a spin doctor’s hand.

***

Walking back towards the cities
the prophets are leaving their mountains.

We walk, they say, between the dark and the light,
in a veil of unknowing and knowing.
Watch the gnats who dance their dance of corpuscular flight.
Feel the Credo of your inner candle calling.
Set the flame in the window of your eyes.
In this naughty world we need to see your good deeds shining

***

Let December rain its lines of lamentations,
the hawk fly from the Bush, the Yew tree cry.
Let living rooms resign themselves to dying.
My eyes will serve as windows for the candles,
my voice will cry out, ‘Please put down your guns,’
my heart will beg you stop this waste of lives.

***

This is not the time to write a poem.
This is not a time to play with words.

Julie Boden