What is left if nothing’s left?
The tap loses teeth-blood,
Each empty cup smiles with malice.

We have fallen over the fence,
Our pictures torn, a history in bags,
We walk like a cluster of wraiths

As dull legs trudge over stones.
The old will wither with frost
When the night comes sooner.

And if the children cry in the night
There is nothing more to say
Than that the stars are hungry too.

So at some point
you start to notice the difference

that makes this single;
a sparrow on a fallen wall,

the first change of glass
to drops of water,

loam broken from under
in a garden’s warmer corner.

You start to hold the finite
a coin minted and shaped,

held for a last time,
then spent as your body;

the past like the hidden part
of an iceberg; lost in blue.

A small locked heart,
webbed and half fish

or a netted bird;
swan and wings

drinking brewed tears;
unfinished as a jot,

ready to shatter the cage,
a shout locked in a box.

The first chapter;
a story full of air.

Shoved in a jacket, a folded heart,
a breakage of notes about the body fascism.
Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben
ist barbarisch. So sing then a song about
Oswiecim, about the ice on the Sola, about
Silesian firs, tell the story of a train hanging under
stars, late from Hannover. Tell me in hushed tones
about a hole in a roof, about rushed concrete,
about the sinking to ash.

Then throw this poem into the sun.
No paper can carry this weight.