—out of a sheer, sunlit countryside,
where sometimes a goat made the only sound in
all the universe, and a car engine would certainly
tear the wing of an angel. Entering burnt Warsaw
and the Sound of the World, how strange, how
lonely
the separate notes of Everything, lost in a smell
of
spent shots still smoking, a ghost of bombs,
a silence
of so many voices, the ruined city singing not
only
a post-war song but an Everything hymn of dogs
wailing,
a car, a horse, a droning plane, a slow, distant
demolition, hammers like rain, the hum, the hum,
bells and levers and voices leveled and absorbed
into the infinite hum in which the ruins
sat empty and low like well-behaved children—
the ruins, their holes, like eyes watching
from either side—as we entered Warsaw, an air
of lost worlds in a smoky sweet light—
Copyright © 1984 by
Helen Degen Cohen.
Appeared in Spoon River Quarterly, Fall 1984; 1st Prize from Soundings;
reprinted in Concert at Chopin's House, New Rivers Press, 1987;
and in Blood to Remember, American Poets on the Holocaust, Texas
Technology University, 1991.
This version has been edited for
the Poetry Porch by JW.
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