The Sun Still Shines

A murder of crows descended on the killing fields
the grounds covered
by mourners in black muttering
racous laughter
a large forested cemetery behind fences
like a secret
they made a maze for the condemned
they cut off all their hair
machine-gunning them as they ran
through the tight trench
while loudspeakers blared a brave fanfare
like it was a video game

My hands could only shiver
cold, no climate-control
just family-planning on the
national level, empty fields
ravens and rows of barns with
terribly mundane
holocaust histories on plaques
terribly mundane
all that work it must have taken to
sort out every last gold filling
build all the resettlement camps
try to prevent escapes
all those bullets wasted
isn't that what the gas chambers were for?
to keep it simple?  just
a couple rows of barbed wire
German efficiency seemed to be used
in retelling the story
a series of incomprehensible statistics
Nov. 3rd, 1943 whole towns of people shot
on the spot they
called in extra guards and even tanks just in case
the survivors were mostly political prisoners
not Jews the instruments used
insufficient rations layers and ribs laid bare
dehumanized you have to read between the
lines; it took them a month to burn the bodies,
they had a crematorium with seven ovens in a town
that maxed out around 40,000 the gas chambers were
just empty garages, and zyklon b is just a clothes disinfectant
that happens to choke the lungs in five minutes sometimes they
just used automobile exhaust.

a ghost town
a gold rush
a genocide just outside
the Lublin city walls

There were just two stiches of
personalization, humanization of
statistics that I saw there:
First a family portrait of a wealthy
family from Lublin, 10 or so
members.  On the left, a black-
haired beauty with deep eyes.
They died separately in Majdanek, Sobibór,
Treblinka, the Lublin ghetto, and Bełżec.
Secondly, there was a single
white high heel in the barn
full of confiscated shoes.  What
kind of woman wears her best
heels to a concentration camp, or
even to forced resettlement?  Denial?
Self-delusion?  Naïvety?   Moxie?   Or did she
hope to save herself through
sensuality?  It was to no avail,
all the same.  In loud voices visitors
mutter, do I hear them correctly?
Disbelief and conspiracy.

The crows mutter mild vulgarities,
Squatting on hallowed grounds
and floating in the sunset like ghosts.

The sun still shines on Majdanek,
Cold, cruel, unflinching.