Howie Good | 2 Poems
After Auschwitz
“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” – Theodor Adorno
Survivors with faded numbers tattooed on their wrinkled forearms slowly reboard the tourist bus. The archives they were supposed to visit burned down months ago. Yahweh beckons me forward with a curled finger. Don’t make eye contact, I remind myself. Seconds later I feel the blast wave on my cheek. It also knocks off my hat. “Look!” Yahweh booms in his usual angry voice. “Remember!” There are clouds, come evening, that will resemble bleeding stigmata. There are birds that return to nests in the eyeholes of skulls. I could try to explain it to anyone who asks. No one asks.
The Climax
I was confronted with a feeling that others knew nothing about. What I took at first to be birds and trees were neither, but like one of those direct-to-video Bruce Willis action flicks – blah blah, pow pow, and over in something less than ninety minutes. Workers in hard hats and safety goggles and swinging sledgehammers were taking down a wall. A green-eyed woman brushed at the brick dust on my clothes. We might have been dreaming each other. Her mouth tugged at me and tugged. There is no darkness so dark as the darkness stirring under a blanket of luminous clouds.
Howie Good’s latest poetry books are The Horse Were Beautiful, available from Grey Book Press, and Swimming in Oblivion: New and Selected Poems from Redhawk Publications.
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