Yom HaShoah 2010 - Second Annual Guest Poem

REPETITIONS OF OSWIECIM

By Nicholas Samaras

Oswiecim is the original name for the town

later called by its German referent (Auschwitz).

The original name has since been reinstated.

We could not cry here.

A dry land in a fertile field.

History a dry land always.

We could not cry here

and there are porcupines

in our throats. Oswiecim.

Each time we watch the story,

chewed bread chokes us.

Dry-eyed. Each time history

a slow accretion of details.

A slow accretion of silence we

could not cry. Numb magnitude. Eyes

hovering over the book and the map.

A parched country, the mirage of it. Oswiecim.

Open days, we dress in our lives.

Shirts buttoned at the windpipe.

Wrapped nights we go flying, go

anywhere into chronology, drummer

in our wrists, blue veins mapping

the skin--thus tattooed--a dry land

welling—Oswiecim—details of wings

hovering, details of thresholds

in ageing photographs

and the shadows

of doors. Pale ashan rising.

Still picture of a heavy door edging

closed or open. Barbed

ironflake, parchment, ash.

The name of a town

and the name of a town again.

Mutable cartographies.

Crust of bread.

A porcupine.

We could

not here.

Cry.

This poem will be appearing in an upcoming issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review. For last year's Yom HaShoah poem, by Blu Greenberg, click here.