[schatz]

i have no mind
for the thickness in the gas,
spraying onto a child’s skin -
but i have the thought
that your alternative to the conflict
counts not for sin.
and if it did, i know
my God has forgiven
you, before the guards
who brought you there,
or the man who took your bribe.
in some brown and dingy
image, i piece up
the war you lived:
the hands that held you down;
the tattoo above his tongue;
and the marks of beasts he obeyed.
i try to uncloud what earthly will he had
to make you some sort of slave,
but these things are not known to me.
i don’t have the focus
for the picture, sitting in your mind:
it must come before most thoughts
and boil under others.
it must denature joy
and any hope you build for forgetting all of that.
and i guess for this life,
(a child looking both ways;
both ways are bombs)
i hope the chaos paused
somewhere along the way;
though only to return, once you began to think it wouldn’t.
if you’ve had to earn the quiet beyond your bones,
(for having nothing to believe in)
so be it;
but now its yours! this calm from Earth’s whole storm!
i hope Heaven makes a room for you thats all yours!
even if its just to polish floors,
rest assured, there’ll be no war:
no wooden shoes or embedded shrapnel to your limbs.
i’m sorry you did not have more happiness
but what calms you now will be forever,
so says our God who art in Heaven,
there, i pray you’ve found your way. ~
this was for my grandma who passed away in Dec. 04. She was an orphan in Nurnberg during WWII and as a young girl, offered her body to one of the guards to avoid the gas chambers. she lived a very promiscuous life with never much guidance and had it not been for my grandpa (an american soldier), I can only imagine her fate.