Sixty Years ago
The best and worst
Machine of death
The world has known
Stopped loading
Barely living bones
From off the ramp
To starve in slavery
Tortured rules
Experiments on teenaged girls
Slow death
From sudden beatings
Necks half-snapped
Before forced meetings
Standing hours
In mind and snow
Clothed naked
Useless frozen tools
Discarded into ditches whole
Not fat to make a candle from
Life worth less than the paper time
It stopped.
(Try as I might
I see no light
That comes from this
Like Levi
All that’s known
Can only make the heart grow dark)
One day
Some sixty years ago
It stopped.
Andrew Fincham
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/auschwitz-25th-january-2005/