Yom Hashoa

The Breendonk concentration camp is embraced

by a freeway and a suburb. It looks like a fairy

tale castle, but nature is a cover-up I follow

walk into the first corridor. Silence is a monster

my footsteps echo, filling it’s belly it is hungry.

The audio guide tells me that noise was a way

of life the clatter of boots, beating, beating,

beating, dogs barking. Life is a glass and

the screaming can shatter it, but now there

is silence and I can feel it on my skin

it is too loud. The click of my camera’s

shutter, shudders like a half-remembered

gun shot.

Most firing squads would miss

humanity shaking through their fingertips

and the commandants enjoyed killing

too much, taking lives with their own

fingertips. It is so quiet here.

And in the silence we forget. On Holocaust

Remembrance day my Facebook feed is more

concerned with Sloths than with Yom Hashoa.

Maybe, memory is slow and it has yet to catch

up to us, but silence eats memory.

At the Boneville damn museum, I stand

in front of blankets in glass cases, the sign

reads, gifts for the Indians. Maybe, we think

that silence is a gift to let something rest peacefully

is not a gift it is a deaf sentence.

We teach ourselves factual inaccuracies

to avoid hearing the thing that we don’t want

to ask ourselves. What would I do if I was

there?

Fact, fear was not a factor for bystanders

most people benefitted greatly from the murder

like America benefitted from the slaughter

of the Indians, like the sugar barons benefitted

from writing a constitution without Hawaiian

recognition. People didn’t do anything

because they didn’t want to.

Fact, if the number of words in this poem

devoted to rescuers was proportional

to the number of bystanders. They would

receive one word. That word is choice

It is a choice to forget. It is a choice to walk

down that hallway. It is a choice to be a hero.

It is a choice to be a perpetrator. It is a choice

to remember.  

The earth has bandaged itself in green

and filled its arms with tears, but we

just see beauty. We cannot understand

that we are the scars.

Humanity is a scar. We are the only

evidence of every war crime. We are

the only record of every person that died

We are the silence, we are the noise.

Noise once shattered people at Breendonk

Today silence shatters them again.

When we do not remember our voice

sound like Krystallnacht, when remain

silent our footsteps smell like ash.