AN INCH AND A BIT OF LIPSTICK

Forward, forward, boots crunched forest leaves
like human heads.
On streets they rang victory bells.
The eagle hovered amongst noise-ravished clouds,
its claws that had torn the throats of Europe, retracting.

Tucked inside teeth, stories bit into 1944 Auschwitz.
We whispered them. We hid them under mattresses.
They drifted in the ashes above our scalps.
We repressed expendable energies and waited.

One day the loudspeaker ordered assembly.
The feared Mengele stepped from a limousine.
Khaki neat, his shoes gleamed with black treachery,
hair reflected light from a black moon.
The Angel of Death, we muttered on tongues
burdened with the taste of burnt flesh.

We stood in open cold, like hundreds of plants
harvested, superfluous, from the desert;
leafless, flowerless, our skulls like moving bulbs.
In striped black and white minstrel cloth
we swayed without song, without dance.
Mengele stood on a platform and stared.
He pointed a white, gloved finger at those he wanted……

Polish blood still surged rebellious in my mother.
Polish flesh lingered on our bones.
Mother knew the thinnest, most hollow-faced
would breathe gas, the pointed-at, saved.

From somewhere on her body she took
an inch and a bit of gold metal,
uncapped it and slashed its blood across my mouth,
rubbed it into my face, into her mouth, her face.
She pushed me to stand with the most skeletal,
their shoulders like spurs on callow cliffs.

She followed. We raised our heads and smiled red.
The white glove summoned us and we ran past
the standing dead, through the gate to a cattle truck.
We fell inside. With others, our fused bodies
sparked hope. Held by the truck’s wooden arms,
the discipline of wheels, we rode
with our destinies smiling to the Kurzbach work camp.

1st prize Open, Free Verse,
Kingaroy Literary Eisteddfod 2008

PIGS

We dug potatoes.
The paddock ached when we tore its flesh.
Our bodies ached. We all ached.

Two SS came with machine guns.
They smiled, relaxed us with jokes.
They said they were from a kommando.
They wanted farmers, German-speaking,
for a pig farm in an adjoining paddock;
said pigs were easier than potatoes.

With Spanish prisoners, I raised an arm,
and held it whining in the air.
The SS ordered us into line.
They tossed their shoulders at us,
pushed their faces to ours, asked questions.

I said I was a farmer, familiar with pigs, and strong,
but truly was city-bred. I lied for my life,
and knew then I would always lie.
Twenty-six of us, wrapped in hopeful silence,
waited for a verdict.
Six too many. The SS wanted twenty.

They rechecked our line.
The SS who questioned me, suspected my lies.
He kicked at my genitals.
I side-stepped and his boot struck my hip, grounding me.
I knelt, and with eyes like frypans,
watched the reprieved walk away.

We, the rejected, took our aching backs back
to the aching paddocks,
the aching potatoes, the waiting spades.
Tears of disappointment soaked the coarse cloth
of my shirt.
Blood dripped from my hand down my thigh.
I thought I would collapse; be pitchforked
and buried in the cold earth with the potatoes.

Then heard the rap rap of machine guns.
We turned and saw the chosen falling,
shot as they crossed the invisible camp line.

The SS ran to us, arms outstretched.
Their laughter whistled through their uniforms.
They shouted ‘Who else knows how to feed pigs?’

STRAWBERRIES

For three years the Germans bottled
and sealed us in the ghetto.
The Russians blasted open our lids
and we spilled into our wired town.

On a hot, hot day I smelt the river.
With three friends we chiselled the wire.
Heads tuned to the swinging grass
we scuttled through meadows
to the banks of the Elbe.

I dived the water and flung it repossession.
Its clean, fresh spirit embraced me.
My body challenged its current with my will
that had challenged the grip of the ghetto.

I grabbed the river’s reeds, its flowers, leaves,
licked its stones, laughed and sang.
I drew the sun inside me,
swam way upstream then downstream
back to my friends who couldn't swim.
They floated,
paddled and sang their happiness.

Angling our return we found a field
of strawberries,
ripening red and golden.
We rolled amongst them, picked them
from our either side, ate them, juicing them
in our mouths;

and I thought I could never in my life
experience such joy again, lying in a field
of strawberries, cleansed of lice,
sun-soaked, lapped by wind, smelling of river
and strawberries -
freedom waiting.

3rd prize Open, Free Verse,
Kingaroy Literary Eisteddfod 2008