Mother's Day Poem

Mother’s Day Poem

I remember my mother, her old house,

the miracle of her love, her fingers

on my cheek brushing away the night,

the world coming home for breakfast,

her eyes asking if I’d been on the road

for long and was the traffic heavy.

Nothing speaks of love like her kindness,

not the birds swirling in the mountains

nor starlight in the trees.  Nothing speaks

of hope like her silent prayers for me

in the morning before school or the bread

and soup she placed before me at night.

Some people seek comfort in a priest,

the way he washes his hands in holy water,

raises his chin to drink the wine.  But it’s mothers

who divide the loaves and fishes, collect

the crumbs, sweep the floor, and find lost coins.

One day they’ll call us home for the last supper. 

___________________________________

To read more about my mom and her life please click on the following:  a blog I did called Remembering my Mother.  It contains links to a number of my posts about her.  

The Country of War: A Poem

This is a poem to be read while thinking about going to war to stop a war. 

The Country of War

War comes down
like a hammer, 
heavy and hard,
flattening the earth 

scorching it
as though a hot iron 
had been taken to it,

killing the soft things: 
children and horses
love and hope

killing the good 
of the earth,
the coolness 
of its creeks,
the look of trees 
uncurling
their leaves 
in late March 
or early April.

You smell 
this country
before you see it.

_______________________

The above poem is an early draft of a much longer poem that eventually was called "Landscape with Dead Horses."  It appears in my book Echoes of Tattered Tongues.    

Holocaust Remembrance Day 2012

Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah) begins in the evening of Wednesday, April 18, 2012, and ends in the evening of Thursday, April 19, 2012

I wrote the following blog a couple of years ago to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day

I can remember the Holocaust, but I can't do much more. I can't imagine it, I can't describe it, I can't understand it.

My parents weren't Jews. They weren't in the Holocaust. They were Polish Catholics who were taken to Germany to work as slave laborers in the concentration camps there. My dad spent four and a half years in Buchenwald, and my mom spent more than two years in a number of camps around Magdeburg. They suffered terribly, and they saw terrible things done to the people they loved. My mother's family was decimated. Her mother, her sister, and her sister's baby were killed outright by the Nazis. My mother's two aunts were taken to Auschwitz with their Jewish husbands and died there.

I remember asking my mother once if she could explain to me what she felt in the worst month of her worst year in the slave labor camps in Germany. All she could say was, you weren't there.

I wasn't there.

I've spent much of my life writing about the things that happened to my parents in the slave labor camps and reading about what happened in those camps and in the Nazi death camps in Poland where so many Jews died, and still I will never be able to understand or comprehend what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust.

I went to Auschwitz in 1990 with my wife Linda and our daughter Lillian. We walked around, took pictures, tried to imagine what had happened there. We couldn't. We were just tourists.

I wrote a poem about it:

Tourists in Auschwitz

It’s a gray drizzly day
but still we take pictures:

Here we are by the mountain of shoes.
Here we are by a statue of people
working to death
pulling a cart full of stones.

Here we are by the wall where they shot
the rabbis and the priests
and the school children
and the trouble makers.

We walk around some too
but we see no one.

Later, we will have dinner
in the cafeteria at Auschwitz.

We will eat off aluminum plates
with aluminum knives and forks.
The beans will be hard,
and the bread will be tasteless.

But for right now, we take more pictures:

Here we are by the mountain of empty suitcases.
Here we are in front of the big ovens.
Here we are by the gate with the famous slogan.

Here we are in front of the pond
where the water is still gray from the ashes
the Germans dumped.

Adolf Hitler's Suicide Day, April 30: A Poem

66 years ago today, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. Some historians say he killed himself with a cyanide capsule, others say he shot himself first.


My mother didn't know how he killed himself, and she didn't much care. She was happy that he did it.

She had never met him, but she had felt his fist across her face, his whip across her back. She was taken to Germany as a slave laborer after watching her mother, her sister Genja, and Genja's baby daughter murdered. My mom's sister Sophie was raped too. My mom escaped by jumping through the window and escaping into a forest. The Nazis caught her pretty soon after that.

My mother didn't talk much about what happened to her and her family. When I was a kid, I thought her silence came from annoyance with my questions about the war. Later, I realized that she didn't talk about her experiences because she wanted to protect me from the terrible things that happened, even though I was a grown man and a teacher.

Here's a poem I wrote about what Hitler did to my mom and her family.

My Mother was 19

Soldiers from nowhere
came to my mom’s farm
killed her sister Genja’s baby
with their heels
shot her momma too

One time in the neck
then for kicks in the face
lots of times

They saw my my mother
they didn’t care
she was a virgin
dressed in a blue dress
with tiny white flowers

They raped her
so she couldn’t stand up
couldn’t lie down
couldn’t talk

They broke her teeth
when they shoved
the blue dress
in her mouth

If they had a camera
they would’ve taken her picture
and sent it to her

That’s the kind they were

Let me tell you:
God doesn’t give
you any favors

He doesn’t say
now you’ve seen
this bad thing
and tomorrow you’ll see
this good thing
and when you see it
you’ll be smiling

That’s bullshit

__________________

The poem first appeared in the Chattahoochee Review.

The photo was taken by my wife Linda in 1979 or so. From left to right in the back row, it's my dad, my mom, my sister Donnna, her daughter Denise, and me. In the front row are my sister's daughters Kathie and Cheryl.

To read other poems about my mom, check out The Guzlowski Sampler, a site set up at Eastern Illinois University, where I taught.