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.