With my hair soot red
as coals above my grandfather’s bones,
buried near the poems of Desnos,
I hurried through the Gate of Death,
up the gallows’ knoll,
the executioner’s chiseled wall,
to see the Ohre’s shores rivering out
to wag the Elbe’s long tail,
and hurried through the tunneled mounds
down again to hell,
past the fire’s wind lash
of oven grates to holding cells
where brush wire and Jewish arms
in tubs of creosol
scrubbed all brains of the mind’s eternal no.
In their bones the earth’s push-step
the Aryan angel denied, moved me
to doubt in a changing world,
that all things, including stone, began
from one single Godly loss of breath.
On the slab at Terezin, in the “Lords House,”
I climbed to bed, cold as heaven,
and played dead.
This poem appeared in “The Hunger Wall” (Grove/Atlantic Press).
James Ragan is the author of eight books of poetry. For 25 years he taught as director of the USC Professional Writing Program and is currently distinguished visiting professor of poetry at Charles University in Prague.
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