Best Buchenwald Poems

Barbed wire seems a 'thorny' subject on which to opine,
But there arose a need for such for people and beasts to confine!
Cowpokes cussed as they worked with it mutilating their hands.
Sheepherders fussed with cattlemen as it spread across their lands!

'Tis said back in 1874 Joseph...

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After the quiet we all have to go
Dragged and carted by the Sonderkommando
To be dumped in pits covered by lime
A race to dispose by it's Human slime

Auschwitz, Buchenwald & Dachau slaughtered
Many a son, many a daughter
Experiments on children women and men
Some aged 90, many under...

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holókauston

Around that table picture the scene 
Self appointed leaders if you know what I mean 
What were the topics on the agenda that day 
The Jewish race is about to pay 

Who gave the right for this decision that's made 
Who has the right to...

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Jingle-jangle bells
   Sing-song syncopation
Ambulances hurtle down streets
   of post-war Europe

Eerie bells; haunting bells
   ghosts of round-ups, of Auschwitz 
of Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen
   sounds of death and doom

Shades drawn suddenly
   blinds sealed tight
Breath held; pin-drop silence
...

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INTO THE LIGHT: SAFE HAVEN, 1944
                                       ...

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I am sitting at the Arizona Memorial,
which shows how far my scruples have gone.
I lived in Hawaii for years, and
could almost claim to be a kamaaina.
without the least inclination
to visit this memorial to war.
I look at the line up of people, a
new group every forty...

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Cycloidal forms transmuting to the involute
obduration under duress a malleable direction
coming to nothing just the gearing of time
Spartan gates left open to a millennium of thought
three legged animals given there a soft palfrey canter
air floating fish seen and their no need water
still the rusting coulter...

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When I was young, my father wrote poems, lovely poems, in Yiddish.
In one poem, he called me, his only son, his 'kadish'l, the one who would recite the Kaddish, the Prayer for the Deceased, for him upon his passing.
It was a touching poem, one which...

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meanness
cruel actions
human history
this being our legacy
before being submerged in our own heart-waste
what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor, Buchenwald
Dachau, Belzec, Chelmno, Warsaw, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen?
No more war....

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On the canvas of a cold, grey, winter sky,
In large black letters above the Iron Gate,
Read the message: "Arbeit Macht Frei".
A shrewdly sinister, propagandist lie,
Designed to deceive all of our eventual fate.
This was the very first thing I saw,
When I got off the train at...

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( In recent days The Pope likened the Gaza Strip to a Concentration Camp. ) 

Hard Lines ( The Final Solution ) Forgotten

5 million 933 thousand 900 hundred Jewish people
The Holocaust
Of  Buchenwald, Dachau, Auschwitz,  Dzierzazna and Litzmannstadt
So many names
Of places of horror
And horror...

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Her shadows' printed on the wall
at Aushwitz and at Buchenwald
She stares out of the Holocaust
with vacant eyes, forever lost
She's traveling the "Trail of Tears"
She falls behind but no one hears
In Vietnam a rain falls down
in Agent Orange we watch her drown
her hands are reaching out...

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Saturnalia my Dream 

Cycloidal forms transmuting to the involute
obduration under duress a malleable direction
coming to nothing just the gearing of time
Spartan gates left open to a millennium of thought
three legged animals given there a soft palfrey canter
air floating fish seen and their no need water
still...

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Heart's silent scream
     lovers torn 
       from savaged arms

   Hunched over 
     bludgeoned into queue
       they disappear from view

    Auschwitz
...

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this is a true if near impossible contest
how can you write a poem about mourning
and honouring the ones deceased in a war
without it being somewhat political

you do not have to be a feminist
and as a man I hope to be one
to know that the personal...

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