A cold river divides us:
Cold currents, cold fish, cold limbs,
A carnival of shattered ice
They traverse, barefoot,
With bleeding feet, frostbitten blood,
To risk a safari of lethal ice.

At all hours the ice clinks,
A toast to all-is-well,
A prayer to our Caucasian God.

But still they come.
Bent like sunstroke puppets,
They escape in work,
Poorer than poor,
Theft of wages, theft of hope!
Feeding their families
The scraps of a backbreaking harvest;
They are ghost conscripts
In a war of ideology
And blood money.

O unwitting tourists!
O deported dream!
The Cathedral bell
Has been foreclosed,
The hour of worship
Gone bankrupt.

Pain is not hypothetical,
Horror not implausible:
History speaks with a stutter.

America, can you hear the bullhorns?
Can you see the floodlights
Melting icy air with their brutal stare?
Can you feel the pirouettes of fear,
Of children vomiting tears?

In Nuremburg the condemned
Spoke of laws
And orders and justice.
Yes, they spoke of laws
And orders and justice,
Then scoffed at the hangman’s rope.

I have heard the enslaved hounds
Forced to howl.
I have been blinded
By flashlights
Raiding the night
Like luminous fangs.
And I have felt the rope
Slither like lead
‘Round my reluctant waist.

In the distance
They hear whispers of debate,
Whispers of debate
Carried
By an incarcerated wind.

O ice perfumed by bullets!
O panorama of winter’s
Barbed-wire camp!
O cold hatred
Freezing the heart!
O summer, why do you refuse
My kind entreaties?

“My son,
Winter has rounded up
My heat, my blooms, my promise,
And put them to work
Murdering the harvest
As though the sugar of unpicked strawberries
Could sweeten death’s ignorant tongue.”

Written Saturday, May 19, 2018