Monday, September 19, 2016

Today the Gypsies are Burning





















My poem "Today the Gypsies are Burning" was recently featured as the poem of the day at Verse Daily.

The poem is about the burning of the gypsies in the German death camp Auschwitz.



Today the Gypsies are Burning

Their dying is something fierce,
like a blizzard wind, like wolves
startled into anger and rage
by the death of one of their own.

Their singing rises in the wind,
their red and orange scarves
and rainbow shawls swirling
in a maelstrom of gasoline flames.

Death cannot hold them.

They are pilgrims who need no God
to save them, no coin to buy them free,
no gray statue on the cusp of time.



The wind’s their mother, their home.

_________

The poem appears in Echoes of Tattered Tongues, my book about my parents and their experiences as slave laborers in the German concentration camp system during WWII.

The Roma mother and her children pictured above died in Auschwitz.



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