The Undercurrent

for Holocaust Memorial Day

I read an article by a survivor,
on a news website.
Separated thus by time and place,
so many years and miles making
that enormous gulf, a red canyon
of human memory, I cannot feel
the death march in my sole.
We can’t experience the whole
of human wickedness inflicted on
that man. But we can own our privilege.

The name of treachery is Blood.
The senators beneath their desks,
cowering like schoolchildren
from the atomic bomb,
as men and women painted, fierce, throng
the offices of law.
And leading them from those same offices,
Blood stands and licks his hands, and grins,
his eyes not evil but vacant
of any moral sense, or sense at all.
The Devil did not murder you.
You were murdered by The Fool.

George Blake (1922 to December 26th, 2020) was a spy with Britain's secret intelligence, who worked as a double agent for the Soviet Union. He has been described as having caused more deaths of British spies than any other "traitor" of the period. (He estimated his death tally at about 400.) He was exposed, served a brief period in a British jail, escaped, and fled to Russia, where he spent the rest of his life.

I couldn't dig up all the guilt
(you no doubt didn't feel),
not because of loyalty
to Queen and country, policy,
nor any dull, bladed concept we used
to starve the Irish fields,
to fill the workhouses,
and rape a path across
the Indian subcontinent.

Because, instead, of cowardice
when faced with extreme pain.
The information sold
to Moscow's torturers
was used to smash the teeth,
and break the bones, and snap the limbs,
to violate the very blood
of countless men who'd come into the world
inviolate, and innocent.

However much you dreamed
of worlds more just than ours,
philosophy crumbles
and faith shatters like coal
beneath the sledgehammer.
Pain is apolitical.
The bloody screaming mouths
and addled glucose eyes
of men you might have joked with once,
or asked how was the wife,
are what swims into vision when
the grave is opened for
your old and well-fed corpse.

I walked out on Capitol Hill,
my pant suit cut like pastrami
on rye: thin slices to make a wad,
the meat piled and cradled in the bread.
 
I spoke for all the dead
women to that male assembly,
Minerva by my side and even Jupiter
respectful of our turn to speak.
I didn't know he'd raped again.
 
The chairman Zeus laughed at us when
we said that each woman,
just as a man is blessed with genius,
is gifted with juno.
'She thinks herself a gift!' he roared.
 
'Does Io think herself adored
now that she languishes in fields,
reduced to sharing cud
with all the other cows?'
I looked at Jupiter, confused.
 
'You didn't know that Io was abused
by your unsatisfied husband?'
Now Zeus was trembling with mirth.
My husband blushed as red
as evening in Hades. He looked away.
 
Olympia was rolling, gay;
our chairman shot a thunderbolt
directed at Minerva's heart
and mine. 'I've seen that cow!'
Poseidon laughed. 'A pretty heifer, too!'
 
Minerva stared at me. 'You knew?'
'I don't know what they mean!' I said,
but suddenly I did. The heifer in  
the field outside had looked at me  
with glum, black eyes.
 
The cruel disguise
was forced on her by Jupiter,
the metamorphosis designed
to keep his rape of her hidden.
To take away her voice.
 
We left the podium. No choice
allotted us would save our dignity
by then. The poets called me jealous, mad,
a wife of incomparable hauteur.  
We learn our place, we fat harpies:
 
to be pleasing, like silent peonies.