The children were of course, not allowed,
of course to go to school.
And yet they did try--
many, especially in Theresienstadt,
they tried to educate the kids.
It was exceedingly dangerous.
They had to post a look out and usually
were hiding in a hayloft or something like that,
so that they could learn in the midst of this.
Orders of the day.
After the bellowed call to rise, the cold dribble
wash up before making our cots.
After chores were dealt out as we crumbled bread
into sour cabbage, then fell in line
to be totted up numbers matched to fate.
There was a moment before the scramble to class,
lookouts posted below the attic hutch.
No more than a flicker, a bright, brutal remembering,
when we became ourselves again.
Cow licked and plaited, flush with pocketed apples
or tucked away sweets.
We were not hunched in rain being counted or shivering
under rafters trying to keep pace
with our dreams of the outside world.
We were merely children, and that brief forgetting, that
raging stupor we tried to hold quiet in our heads,
as if in a brimming goblet, until the day
lurched upright barking its orders.
That moment was easily the most blissful or shattering instant
we would live through on Earth.
This hard and sullen earth we no longer recognized, but would
sooner than later commit our souls
to when at last our bodies crumbled
into their final resting place.