"Terezín."
"At first, the ashes were placed in a wooden box, later paper.
Always a name on the box.
Always notations in the log.
How much oil used, temperature and duration of the fire,
name of the shift workers, cause of death.
Four ovens.
Five bodies burned at one time.
20 bodies, each 20 minutes.
Not a death camp, just a town for concentrating
people who were hated.
Sufficient disease, torture, bullets, the prisoners
hoisted pulley and wench all night long.
Sorting collective ash into separate piles,
assigning one of five names.
15,000 children, a life of lists, nothing ever complete,
passed through Terezín.
100 survived.
The children attended secret school in the attics.
Three or six months, one or two years, depending on their luck.
They studied literature and scripture, performed operas
and plays, edited a journal, while the transports arrived
and departed continually.
Near the end, covering tracks, the Nazis
made a chain of children, the lucky ones who'd survived,
spanning from the crematorium to the river.
One night, 22,000 urns were emptied into the flow.
The pasty sludge dispersing, raining down
over carp and crayfish, settling onto the silt where it remains.
What hasn't floated downstream with crumbs of bone too light
to sink.
How many rivers carry such a burden?
Their music, the Psalm, my sorrow
is continually before me.
Mother cherish your child.
I am a leaf ripe for falling.
See how I cower here shivering.
I am so cold."