After Auschwitz
When you say “seniority, color, nationality and religious politics –
all of which we can’t avoid even if we try to” I agree.
Those “grand narratives” or assigned windows. Yet we can look out them.
– from Pinsky’s email
i
The Exodus, the Assyrian exile and then Babylon.
The Pharaoh’s order: Hebraic newborns to die
in the Nile. With the Third Reich came the worst.
Now with the last Reich in ruins, at Auschwitz
– the Nazis called it the “Final Solution” to Jews –
strewn with memories of transport trains
crammed with captives for “concentration”
– a euphemism for slaughter, of corpses,
bones and human ashes from its crematorium,
of bone crushing machines for the striped clothes,
and of Zyklon B in the Gas Chambers,
liberated by the Red Army in that cold January,
we need a new art of cartography, to map intolerance
from the Alexandrian pogrom to the Holocaust,
and at last a declaration of beauty in life.
ii
After Auschwitz, we read Anne’s diary
and the wealth of dark texts on innocent pages,
saw Olère’s paintings like “Arrival of a Convoy,”
listened to Shostakovich’s Op. 113 “Babi Yar”
or Górecki’s Op. 36 “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”
and I still see the specters of paranoid disorder.
History changes its course like a wild river
and tells that we almost never learn from it:
new killing fields unroll their cold carpets of ruin.
iii
I’m sick of all these pogroms. We’ve had enough.
You know these didn’t happen to Jews alone.
Black July, anti-Sikh riots, Babri Mosque, Gujarat,
anti-Hindu riots, Ramu in this sediment-rich delta,
anti-Rohingya unrest across the Naf…my heart bleeds.
What does despair get wrong about? Yes, there are
“assigned windows,” waiting to be thrust open
to let the radiance light up the darkness inside us;
often late but still not too late to be good.
When you say “Yet we can look out them,” I bring myself
up from despair’s black-hole, against all likelihoods.
Anxiety then gets paved with new anticipations.
O Clio, history has nothing to do with sleep;
in daylight we see its spoils as that fleece in Colchis,
at times in cellophane wraps. Yet, every time
we clear shells and skeletons to let flowers bloom
– a reminder of what the flowerbuds went through –
there’s the feeling survivors had, when rescued at long last.
Yes, poets go on as the lowest paid, if not otherwise.
Some of us elsewhere in life’s deadliest camps
still die of exhaustion or starvation – a reward indeed
for tilling the white space of pages, in hopes of
manna during the travels in our own deserts. Or
for a posthumous glory like light at the dark tunnel’s end?
Some remain tyrants’ sycophants in their affluence.
Most others don’t just write about the flame of history,
we live it. Some of us die burned like Jews. Yet, we team up,
as if nothing happened at all, to say life is beautiful
– even though the season of ruin sets in around us –
to make gray a mother of all surrealist colors.
***
This poem is the second in a series of 3. Read the other poems here.
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Photo by Pablo/Flickr