Yunna Morits
A Memory
They threw the children
from the burning train
out onto the grass.
I slithered and swam
in a bloody trench
of bone, gristle, guts.
The pilot who flew overhead,
this scion of the brownshirt blight,
grinned like an invalid,
finally out of his mind.
He hovered in his airborne cage,
pressed to the cockpit glass.
I saw the swastika on his arm,
the sweat on his brow, the rage.
And I saw, too, the red circle
of the locomotive’s wheel.
And fear robbed me
of the strength to exclude
everything I had seen’–
because the engine was motionless,
yet the blood-red fumes
rose from the wheels, turning still,
and the iron lever groaned –
it was like an arm, crooked at the elbow,
torn from the trunk it served,
to keep the locomotive’s wheels
posthumously going round!
This was in the fifth year of my life.
The Good Lord rescued me
for the long way that lay ahead . . .
But in my blood, like mercury,
is the dread that entered my flesh!
And now, in the moon’s view, as I sleep,
so wildly do I lament
that the very wall where the memory
is stored streams with tears.
Translated by Daniel Weissbort
Page(s) 132
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