Child, this I will draw for you on the ceiling

trudge through mud and Typhus, dreams of healing


Remember:

we sleep and dream inside this war machine


we rest, and die wide eyed-

cooped with as much regard as fowl starved for flavor and


killed with a butcher's knife; we are 'inhuman' yet we are still alive.



it is in this war machine that we dream of flight



this war machine we die; in our sleep, at night
when the wind blows and sings the never-forgotten 'Ani Ma'amin'
we seek shelter from this gruesome German winter wind
scattering the burned remains of the Torah and Hemingway across
Canada and the mud and the shallow graves, forgotten in the Black forest and outside Polish Villages,
carrying across the Atlantic, singeing every Jewish passport put on the back-burner:
The wind sings in tones of silent stillness and greatest grief;
“I believe, with a complete belief,
in the coming of the Messiah.
And even though he may tarry,
I will await him, each and every day.”
And in this deadly-efficient dream of life, we will walk to our death in complete fear
our bodies will burn in chimneys and our children will die before our eyes,
the cogs of the machine will turn and fuel will be our Blood-
but child, child, calm now, in this death we shall transform into doves:

doves soar out of a crematorium chimney
bodies pile high into the sun
all of these never- forgotten lives are


all doves, with living, breathing freedom only imagined or dreamed of or yearned
for with every fiber of every conceivable form of human thought and drawn like the transcript of a dream, like the amber clouds of human spirit, written with graphite on a Birkenau wall
six million souls


starved and worked to the barest of bones
no longer a recognizable human being
once beautiful, millions who suffered more than the grayest shade of white:

millions of doves should fly out of the chimney as one alabaster cloud and perch
on the heads of everyone attending the Nuremberg Rally
and perch along the walls of Auschwitz and Birkenau
and cross the Atlantic and line the senate's window boxes where Black Roses grow
Look into the windows of Hitler's villa,
then, with a lift of wings, together,




fly into the sun




toward heaven