Crematorium

At Auschwitz, where the SS Guard abide,
The ingenuous await strategic genocide:

Naked, they loiter in the square,
Shameless before the puffing stacks
That cough smoke and char
As for the final hour of lost Pompeii.

The pall tides into the glades beyond the wire
And pools in the afterglow of sun;
They feel the sun, the gas and heat
Of noon until they must forget, or weep.

They forget the vanishing love of other gone before
Or keep it in the dusting night;
The night through, they wait before the chamber door,
Whispering of talismans and myrrh and Galilee.

The cage and wire and shreds of cloth remain;
The Guard survey their bone in its relief
But do not find awareness surely there,
In the sorrow by the sheds,
Against the thorned wire their bodies stain.

Past the riot of hunger and death,
They dismiss the guard of their flesh
From the surveillance of their shining eyes.
Look at their eyes!