Oswiecim

for those 62 and not 70

Tomorrow I shall apologize

to the one at the store house/ you know him

the one who places figurines in that possessive case,

carries around with him the guilt of being born later,

in the 50's when the smoke and the ashes had rested

on the Polish hilltops. He showed me, and I read

one of the poems he wrote and it was fucked up

but beautiful. The  way the same river that  crests at the

issuance of dawn can drown a child. Can capsize a boat.

Can keep a doe, cut off from it's mother, from crossing;

from believing the worst, yet not ever  the

unthinkable.

Reviews

[Beccy]

Truly outstanding poem. It is both an indictment of the savagery of man, especially to our own kind; yet somehow, that line, f********* up but beautiful, makes it, (at least to me,) a celebration of all that is good in us.

How is that we can create such beauty, yet destroy without compunction?


Beccy.

[writing mojo]

the baby boomer bumming around have still a life quite that booms.."cause there's beauty in the break down" excellent piece

[h d e rushin]

I love you brother.

[Frank]

I still like this after reading a week later. It is so real, so human and more... transient. Who cares about the Pole who liked figurines and wrote bad poetry, but you did and it is now written by a pen forever.

[LJW]

The yin and yan of all things.

Water gives life, yet can take life.
The beauty of a poem can be in its accurate accounting of life on life's often unseemly terms.

[Frank]

I think you have a beautiful poetic heart, there are sentiments in here that only come with wisdom or with age. Thank you for posting this. The 'Fucked' up line certainly made us sit up, and perhaps we needed that.

I don't think I can say anything esle, sorry.

[emmajoy]

Tragic though your words are, i think of them as a memorial to what should never be forgotten, experienced or not. There must always be tears and anger and guilt, if only to dig into Mankind's psyche.

Superb.

[Terpsichore]

This is the thing about mankind. Physically, you can raze to the ground any infamy, start over; but such is the power of the human mind, you can never every bury the past; nor should we in cases such as these.

T

[Ed Hart]

you load more tangent in your words than any of many, but Mr K has a quick and aged eye...the 'unthinkable' is still alive and well in the world...we must have missed something

some poets are more real than others...i'm sure there'll be a committee meeting about that

[W.k.kortas]

It must be a strange, indeed utterly haunting feeling, to know of things that are part of your experience--the notion of something that "happened to your people"-- but not things you actually experienced, the crucible of others. This is somewhat more compact than the normal run of your work, but it lacks none of the complextity, the layering. It's utterly arresting work, and among your finest, which is saying the proverbial mouthful.

[Delmar Cooper]

I like "fucked up but beautiful." I like words that are brave enough to say things like that. Sort of a wimp's eye view of the possible I've got here.