now seems a lifetime away
as I enter the Holocaust Memorial, Berlin:
2,711 concrete blocks,
various sizes to denote
the difference of those who perished
in the horror rooms where pitiful voices
screamed in vain as another train arrived.
I am perspiring in the humid air,
disorientated in this monstrous, monolithic maze:
slithers of Heaven, blank skyscrapers, a wave,
feeling the ghosts of the innumerable
victims of industrial genocide.
It silently implores us never to forget
and I step back into the modern world
to the Gertrud Kolmar Strasse
relieved to be free from this haunting place
yet with images of a child's doomed face.