Holocaust Memorial Poems

Have you read Pavel Friedmann's "The Butterfly"?
I discovered it in a Children's poem book
he only rhymes with the words "high" and "goodbye"
its imagery gives the...

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The Mountains of the Dead                    ...

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A turning nation
Turn around we all fall

The tall are bound but small
Here comes the crown, swords drawn

A nation turns and the world 
burns spin with...

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Dust
Ashes to ashes
Read as rust fine 
in dust the centuries are lost 
Tomes of history lie in disarray
far away from the terrors of the day...

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Sing Broken Beyond Mankind


because I speak


                IN   

...

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WARS ARE MADE BY MEN (Satis Shroff)

When you walk in the streets of Freiburg
Or any German town in the East or West,
You see lovely, innocent...

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With Blades
I have drawn 
In my restless sleep
I linger in the past
Were my souls 
Dry husks of horrors
Are cast
Each one an image in time
The dead...

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Ashes to Ashes

Smoke
rises in the distance.

The boxcar
rocks,
rocks,
rocks;
stones
are placed along the ties.
Were they placed by Chance
or left 
as gently as Kaddish.
I lift my hands in the...

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I wanted to write
 The best slavery poem   ever written—
Perhaps win a Pulitzer or Faulkner. 

I had every intention of conforming 
To the...

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It may look skin deep but it goes all the way to a soul 

A scar on society and the skin of an innocent 

numerals...

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Looking back, one thing comes clean-glass clear
you were always there for me subduing every fear.

I tried to do my duty, be a husband strong and...

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Memorial Day – 2020... since time immemorial

crème de la crème strongest and bravest
forsook their lives eternal peace they rest
honored and revered succumbed mortal test.

(now pardon...

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Penny Postcard, Wrong Address
by Michael R. Burch

(for the victims and survivors of the Holocaust)

We saw their pictures:
tortured out of our imaginations
like golems.

We could not believe
in...

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Postcard 1
by Miklós Radnóti
written August 30, 1944
translated by Michael R. Burch
 
Out of Bulgaria, the great wild roar of the artillery thunders,
resounds on the mountain...

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I never sleep well when others are wrecked.

Half-awake in my dreams, my blessed life sealed,

Not a victim of history’s fate or neglect.

 

Divine will, a...

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