Now, again a poem translated by Renata Gorczynski
and Benjamin Ivry.
The title is "Watching Show in a Hotel Room in America."
You know of course what show is this.
It is another name for Holocaust,
and a show is also a documentary film made on Holocaust.
Though some nights have the texture of a newborn cold,
we prefer to play chess or cards.
Here the hotel guests are singing happy birthday to you
while the one-eighth TV set is coolly shuffling pictures.
The trees of my childhood have crossed the ocean
and greet me dryly from the screen.
Polish peasants engage in a theological dispute with Jesuit
zest, and only the Jews keep silent exhausted by slow dying.
The streams of my youth flow cautiously
through the unfamiliar distant continent.
Hay wagons are carrying human hair,
and their exhales squeak beneath the airy weight.
"We are innocent," declare the Pines.
The SS officers have turned into brittle old men,
and doctors fight to save their hearts,
and lives, and conscience.
It is getting late.
I sense the scheming wave of drowsiness.
I want to go to bed, but the hotel guests
shout happy birthday to you even louder, much louder
than the dying Jews.
Big trucks carry the stars from the firmament.
Trains ride with melancholy in the rain.
"I am innocent," apologizes muttered, and only the Aspen
trembles as usual ready to admit to any crime.
"Where is my home," the Czechoslovakian Jews sing.
There is no home.
Houses are burning.
The cold gas whistles inside.
I am more and more sleepy and innocent.
The TV set is reassuring both of us are beyond suspicion.
The birthday party reverberates with hoorays.
The shoes of Auschwitz piled into a pyramid that
reaches the sky groan faintly.
Alas, we have outlived mankind.
And now, let us sleep.
Let us sleep.
We have no place to go.