Heart-Work - Journal
Against Humanity by Vivi Steels
Posted on March 4, 2022 at 5:30 AM |
It is with shock and pain that we are viewing what is happening in Ukraine by the invasion of an independent country by Russia. The people of the United Kingdom stand with the people of Ukraine. I am posting this poem called Against Humanity, which I wrote in 1995 about WWII, but which is a very echo of what is happening today. One man interviewed yesterday, who was ferrying people to the Polish border in his van, could hardly speak for tears as the events of the past eight days reminded him of Auschwitz all those years ago... Again we are talking of war crimes and Putin, and those he controls, being brought to justice for his unpardonable actions of war against innocent men, women and children.
Against Humanity
Ceaseless sea
womb of the world
weeps for those
spiked by swastikas –
devil-turned.
Queues of blood-tied
cry for their kind;
showered by gas,
dusted by fire.
The beater, the gas man,
starver, death planner,
march like ghosts –
always at night –
up mountains of silken hair,
over spectacles of barbed wire,
down suitcases of names
stacked like tombstones
against my heaving heart.
Auschwitz – fifty years ago –
I have never left that hell.
I am still there.
Lost.
I pray for dawn
in purgatory –
this blitzkrieg
circling humanity –
as some* bring
cattletrucks of crime
into the glare
of our time.
* Poem dedicated to Simon Wiesenthal, who was a Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer.
Published in CPR International 4 - October 2000, WRITE-AWAY – Spring 2002
& THE WORLD AT WAR (anthology Forward Press Poetry) – Sept 2013
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