60th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, February 2005
The man in the winter tree is stranded, high
above the intermittent cars on the empty road.
The stranded man in the tree is scared,
perhaps silently screaming. The scared,
stranded man high in the leafless
tree has torn, flapping garments.
The screaming, flapping man is wearing a hat.
He is struggling to unhinge himself
from the tangle of twigs and barbed wire
of branches; he seems to be running,
not climbing, and caught in mid-stride,
mouth agape, hat askew, tree-trapped.
The scared, struggling, scrambling,
flapping man is all in white. Dirty white,
the yellowing white of streamers of toilet
paper and of prisoners, life-drained, spread,
dead on fences of concentration camps,
left there to rot, pour decourager les autres.
As I speed on down the road,
having done nothing to rescue the
flapping man, his image fixes
in my conscience.