Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

« Previous item
Contents of this issue
Next item »

Roger Caldwell

print this page

Prague: The Old Jewish Cemetery

It’s impressed into a narrow strip of land
between the Klaus synagogue
and the Ceremonial Hall:

a confusion of tombs,
of crippled slabs aslant,
all higgledy-piggledy,

layer on layer, as if the dead
still like the living
jostled for the common air,

no space left in the damp black earth,
and all around the silence of
the all-but-vanished ghetto.

new soil sprinkled over each fresh grave
for yet another newly dead,
rituals repeated over centuries.

Bordellos, farriers’ huts are gone,
the dog-catchers, outcasts, executioners
of the fifteenth century,

ghetto-hovels all burnt down
by order of a hygiene-minded emperor,
so nothing else in Josefov

can echo what lies here:
the bourgeois streets
deafen with their silence.

Smiling tourists at the gate
queue, pay their admittance charge
for a ticket that won’t save their souls

but will give them pause
to gaze on teetering headstones,
the outnumbering dead,

where but for accidents of time and place
they must lie here too forgotten
confined in a crowded space.

Roger Caldwell writes as literary critic and philosopher for numerous journals. He has published two collections of poetry, This Being Eden (Peterloo Press) and Walking on the Moon (Ninth Arrondissement Press).

Page(s) 49-50

Back to top