Poetic Hours
Online
Autumn 2008
Pete Watson

Even after sixty years.
Even after sixty years,
images return with frightening
regularity.
Projected on to screens of darkness,
pinpointed,self focusing,a chilling
quest for clarity.
Guilt lies heavy,shaping dreams
asking,Why him?Why should he be the
one to survive?
Without family,his testament
to truth must be proclaimed.A single reason
to stay alive.
He avoided eye contact,
performing tasks to the best of
his ability.
Making himself indispensable,
offering no challenges and cloaked in
anonymity.
The brutality of fact
bears witness to hateful and mindless
acts of violence.
Distorted bodies with broken bones,
the rattle of death exchanged for a wall of
deafening silence.
Towering pyramids of
confiscated suitcases
catalogued with chalk.
A fleeting memorial to those
women and children holding hands as they
start their final walk.
Black smoke eclipsing reason,
exhaled from chimneys crusted in
evil.Tall and stark.
The dust of death sifting on to snow
burning it's imprint,fashioned in the shape
of a question mark.
A question still valid.
No final solution but a
creed the world still hears.
Listen to this man,for his story
loses nothing in translation,even
after sixty years.



                      Reflections in a Broken Mirror.
Everything they had planned to do
had been done while (relatively)
unhampered by age or infirmity.
Nothing left unsaid;
no sounds left rusting in his throat.
Tears might dilute the written word
but sentiments remained unchanged,
sustaining love after death did them part
and a dignity
that didn't come from title.
Alterations in awareness
inched their way in many guises,
with stealth and quiet as the devil's breath.
A cancer creeping
and gorging on identity.
Memories escape like foam
ballooning from an old settee.
Those left? Reflections in a broken mirror;
handled carefully
and kept for future reference.

                                          Casualty.
Nerve ends stretched to breaking point,
waiting for the inevitable.
Fallout from the implosion
captured in a bloodied matchbox
and cared for by the spirits of frontline nurses.
Lozenge-shaped memorials
to the fallen of a different era
whisper reassurances,
dispelling a survivor's guilt
in enforced absence from life's battleground.
The search for identity
brought scant reward and it was left to
poets and visionaries
to gather up the pieces
and edge towards some semblance of normality.