An Oak Wood Piano on Kristallnacht

The SS guard hit Zindel Grynszpan on the head and he fell
Into a ditch. Father, he heard the voice of his son, you must
Go on. Zindel took the hand of his son and climbed out of
The trench. With his wife, a son and daughter on his side
They continued the march. But the SS guards did not stop
The savage whipping of the deportees. Blood was flowing
On all sides.

The Grynszpan family were Polish Jews from Hanover.
When the Nazis came to power they became outcasts.
In October 1938 they were expelled from Germany
And deported to Poland in a group of 12,000 Jews.
They were taken by train to the frontier town Neubenschen
And from there on foot to the German-Polish border.
When they reached the border heavy rain started to fall.

The Nazis confiscated their money. They had no food to eat.
Polish officers arrived and began to inspect their papers.
They admitted the refugees with Polish passports,
Housing them in military stables. Old, sick and children

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poem by Paul Hartal
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Whose Life is Worth More?

'Whose life is worth more? ' the SS officer asked.
Jacob Kogen did not answer.
In the eerie silence that ensued
the SS man drew his pistol.

'Tell me', he said, playing with the weapon,
'Whose life is worth more?
Yours? Your wife's? Your children's,
or the life of a stranger? '

'All human lives are equal', Kogen replied.
'You mean the life of a Jew and a non-Jew
has the same value? ' the SS officer asked.

'God created all human beings
equally entitled to their lives', Kogen said.

'In that case you will provide me 7,000 Jews',
the SS man said.

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poem by Paul Hartal
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We Are More Alike Than Unalike

Let the gong-gong ring through
The living rooms of Canada Singapore New Zealand
Russia India El Salvador Poland China Botswana Switzerland
England Papua New Guinea Brazil South Africa
Japan Australia Ireland France Vietnam America…
Let the gong-gong bring first
THE CHILDREN: Their seats are Ready!
Let the gong-gong bring first
THE CHILDREN from Thailand Italy Saudi Arabia The Beloved Country
The Hope The Land of Two Rivers Sao Tome &
Principe Seychelles Equatorial Guinea St Christopher and Nevis Kiribati
THE CHILDREN: Their seats are Ready!
From Yamoussoukro Antananarivo Edinburgh Ouagadougou Oslo
Bandung Karachi Abu Dhabi Lesotho Accra Kabul Harare Cairo
Kuala Lumpur Tel Aviv Lisbon Windhoek Abuja…
Let the gong-gong bring first
THE CHILDREN: Their seats are Ready!

Come all you children of the world
Come all you children and take your seats

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poem by Gabriel Eshun
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Pope John Paul II (A Biography Poem Sequence-4)

Faith of the Millennial Pope: contd

He prayed to Mary and all saints,
And drew from them, his divine paints,
That sketched the glorious work of God,
And brought more souls to Lord’s abode!

Faith sustains man throughout his life,
Providing answers for things rife;
His passion for depicting truth,
Did bear him ultimately, fruit.

The pope, a philosopher great
Was preacher too, with clean a slate;
He loved all mystical debate;
Communism, he did well hate!

His link with God was quite profound;
His faith had strong roots in Poland;
The murders of the Holocaust,

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poem by John Celes
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winter Algarve

Winter Algarve.

The hills in the vale are stony and grey except where
they have made a road up to a new house that looks
shiny and bright for now, but will in time when paint
fades look as it belongs. “That old house you see up
there was built in 2009, ” a tourist guide will say.

The Northerly flies low and cold today olive trees
look silvery as big gorillas standing still contemplating
a sky that has white, billowing clouds sailing across;
a regatta were no one drowns and the winner turns
into a miasma and never seen again

The stones on the old wall look like grey skulls with
holes in like another war mass grave found in Poland.
Everything dies and lives, the grass is green and tiny
Flowers grow out of weed, paradise for wooly backs,
but not for those- the human ones- from St. Helens.

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poem by Oskar Hansen
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Expostulation

OUR fellow-countrymen in chains!
Slaves, in a land of light and law!
Slaves, crouching on the very plains
Where rolled the storm of Freedom's war!
A groan from Eutaw's haunted wood,
A. wail where Camden's martyrs fell,
By every shrine of patriot blood,
From Moultrie's wall and Jasper's well!

By storied hill and hallowed grot,
By mossy wood and marshy glen,
Whence rang of old the rifle-shot,
And hurrying shout of Marion's men!
The groan of breaking hearts is there,
The falling lash, the fetter's clank!
Slaves, slaves are breathing in that air
Which old De Kalb and Sumter drank!

What, ho! our countrymen in chains!
The whip on woman's shrinking flesh!

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poem by John Greenleaf Whittier
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The Norrona-Race

Norrona-race's longing,
It was the sea's free wave,
And fight of heroes thronging,
And honor that it gave;
Their thoughts and deeds upspringing
From roots in Surtr's fire,
With branches topward swinging
To Yggdrasil aspire.

His course alone each guided,
Oft brother-harm was done;
Our vict'ries were divided,
The honor gained was one.
Each heard his call time-fated,
First Norway, Denmark, came,
The Swede the longest waited,
But greatest grew his fame.

In eastern, western regions
The Danish dragons shone,

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poem by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
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Lines On Observing A Blossom On The First Of February, 1796

Sweet flower! that peeping from thy russet stem
Unfoldest timidly, (for in strange sort
This dark, frieze-coated, hoarse, teeth-chattering month
Hath borrowed Zephyr's voice, and gazed upon thee
With blue voluptuous eye) alas poor flower!
These are but flatteries of the faithless year.
Perchance, escaped its unknown polar cave,
E'en now the keen north-east is on its way.
Flower that must perish! shall I liken thee
To some sweet girl of too, too rapid growth,
Nipped by consumption mid untimely charms?
Or to Bristowa's bard, the wond'rous boy!
As amaranth, which earth scarce seemed to own,
Till disappointment come, and pelting wrong
Beat it to earth? or with indignant grief
Shall I compare thee to poor Poland's hope,
Bright flower of hope killed in the opening bud?
Farewell, sweet blossom! better fate be thine
And mock my boding! Dim similitudes
Weaving in moral strains, I've stolen one hour

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poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Kick The Chair

Dawn breaks evenly today
On the truth and the lie
All rise, court's in session
We're hanging someone high
Justice means nothing today
Now that the courts are for sale
Pick a crime from the menu; pick a sentence and defend you
And pay up the down payment called bail
The system's for sale
Kick the chair, the rope's tight
Just like one quick wrench, the tooth is out
Friend or foe, I gotta hang em dead
Or they'll come back around
Kick it!
The court's wrong when it keeps track
Of victories and defeats
The press that never rest just waits
For somebody's soul they can eat
Justice means nothing today
Now that the jury's for sale

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song performed by Megadeth
Added by Lucian Velea
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Polka

The polka is a Central European dance and also a genre of dance music familiar throughout Europe and the Americas. It originated in the middle of the 19th century in Bohemia. Polka is still a popular genre of folk music in many European countries and is performed by folk artists in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Croatia, Slovenia, Germany, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and Slovakia. Local varieties of this dance are also found in the Nordic countries, United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Latin America (especially Mexico) , and in the United States.

Month of February finishes
And March comes
With heavy snow here?
Frozen tears fallen from the sky
As she cannot bear the severe coldness
It seems?
And I think of my loving deceased Mother
Who secured me for nine months in her
Precious polyphony Womb?
How she cried deeply
When she heard that my handsome father
Met an accident in his young age?
Both were in a secluded place now
And practice their favorite *dance
That I am sure.
But I would like to know that
Your place get snow and bombs too sometimes
What we get on this planet Earth

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poem by Nimal Dunuhinga
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Shaving cream

Shaving Cream

On the day that yet another car bomb exploded
in Baghdad, I forgot to buy shaving cream and
had to go back to the shop, there is weariness
about bad news from Iraq. I also forgot to buy
a litre of milk and a goat cheese.

Four thousand US troops killed, which, after
five years of war, as an amazing small number;
but then, this is a war where civilians get to do
the dying.Six hundred thousand or near a million
dead, no one knows or cares, but it might end up
as being as great a crime as the holocaust:

Was it five or six million Jews who perished?
This is a number that concerns deniers greatly,
who are of the opinion that only about 2oo Jews
died, regrettably of typhus, on a train journey
between Poland and Russia.

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poem by Jan Oskar Hansen
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If life goes from bad to worst?

*Günter Wilhelm Grass (born 16 October 1927) is a Nobel Prize-winning German author, poet, playwright, sculptor and artist.

He was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdań sk, Poland) . In 1945, he came as a refugee to West Germany, but in his fiction he frequently returns to the Danzig of his childhood.

He is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum, a key text in European magic realism and the first part of his Danzig Trilogy. His works frequently have a left wing political dimension and Grass has been an active supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

If life goes from bad to worst?
Picked him by an Ambulance
And taken to the Hospital
The old Blacksmith
Who collapsed on the modern concrete road.
Hard to recognize
Either Hispanic, Asian or African
From another planet?
Anyway a Man with a coma!
Heart beat and the pulse abnormal
And much perspiration?
In his hidden pocket
Found a chit
And this was written;

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poem by Nimal Dunuhinga
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Flowers of Horror

People who love flowers
Cannot be bad
Says the proverb.

But take the insight
With a grain of salt
For malignant hands
Can turn flowers
Into graceless means
Of lies and deception.

During World War II
The National Socialists
Perfected the dark art
Of deceit by exploiting
The beauty of nature
To disguise and shroud
Their fiendish goals
Of ruin and destruction.

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poem by Paul Hartal
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When Princes and Prelates

When Princes and Prelates and het-headed zealots
All Europe hae set in a lowe,
The poor man lies down, nor envies a crown,
And comforts himsel with a mowe.—

And why shouldna poor folk mowe, mowe, mowe,
And why shouldna poor folk mowe:
The great folk hae siller, and houses and lands,
Poor bodies hae naething but mowe.—

When Brunswick's great Prince cam a cruising to France
Republican billies to cowe,
Bauld Brunswick's great Prince wad hae shawn better sense
At hame with his Princess to mowe.—

And why shouldna, &c.

Out over the Rhine proud Prussia wad shine,
To spend his best blood he did vow;
But Frederic had better ne'er forded the water,

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poem by Robert Burns
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Grandma

Above the bed
Old photos stared down
Solemnly from the wall.
Behind the glass frame
Grandpa wore
His grey uniform
Of the Great War;
Grandma her sombre dress.

She died before I was born
And grandpa shortly after.
The only grandparent
That I knew was
My mother’s step mother.

For some reason
She did not get along well
With my parents
But I basked
In the warmth of her

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poem by Paul Hartal
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For Zbigniew Herbert, Summer, 1971, Los Angeles

No matter how hard I listen, the wind speaks
One syllable, which has no comfort in it--
Only a rasping of air through the dead elm.

*

Once a poet told me of his friend who was torn apart
By two pigs in a field in Poland. The man
Was a prisoner of the Nazis, and they watched,
He said, with interest and a drunken approval . . .
If terror is a state of complete understanding,

Then there was probably a point at which the man
Went mad, and felt nothing, though certainly
He understood everything that was there: after all,
He could see blood splash beneath him on the stubble,
He could hear singing float toward him from the barracks.

*

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poem by Larry Levis
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Invocation

JUNE, 1866.

BREATHE thro' me in music,
Spirit of the time!
Pregnant with the future,
Spirit of the time!

As the west wind sougheth,
Through the swaying pine,
Sweep tho' all my branches
With thy song divine.

Nations now are rolling
Onward, as the sea
Which the moon upheaveth,
Thus upheaved by thee.

Muffled mutt'ring groweth
Louder on the air!
Like a lion roaring,

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poem by Mathilde Blind
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An Electric Sign Goes Dark

Poland, France, Judea ran in her veins,
Singing to Paris for bread, singing to Gotham in a fizz at the pop of a bottle’s cork.

“Won’t you come and play wiz me” she sang … and “I just can’t make my eyes behave.”
“Higgeldy-Piggeldy,” “Papa’s Wife,” “Follow Me” were plays.

Did she wash her feet in a tub of milk? Was a strand of pearls sneaked from her trunk? The newspapers asked.
Cigarettes, tulips, pacing horses, took her name.

Twenty years old … thirty … forty …
Forty-five and the doctors fathom nothing, the doctors quarrel, the doctors use silver tubes feeding twenty-four quarts of blood into the veins, the respects of a prize-fighter, a cab driver.
And a little mouth moans: It is easy to die when they are dying so many grand deaths in France.

A voice, a shape, gone.
A baby bundle from Warsaw … legs, torso, head … on a hotel bed at The Savoy.
The white chiselings of flesh that flung themselves in somersaults, straddles, for packed houses:
A memory, a stage and footlights out, an electric sign on Broadway dark.

She belonged to somebody, nobody.
No one man owned her, no ten nor a thousand.

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poem by Carl Sandburg
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Resurgite!- June, 1877

NOW, for the faith that is in ye,
Polander, Sclav, and Kelt!
Prove to the world what the lips have hurled
The hearts have grandly felt.

Rouse, ye races in shackles!
See in the East, the glare
Is red in the sky, and the warning cry
Is sounding—'Awake! Prepare!'

A voice from the spheres—a hand downreached
To hands that would be free,
To rend the gyves from the fettered lives
That strain toward Liberty!

Circassia! the cup is flowing
That holdeth perennial youth:
Who strikes succeeds, for when manhood bleeds
Each dropp is a Cadmus' tooth.

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poem by John Boyle O'Reilly
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Russian travel program

Every now and then
there are Russians
travelling to foreign countries
standing in lines
at aeroplanes and vehicles
to on government command
take a return trip without cost:

In 1932 it was right through Siberia
into Mongolia
with excursions through the country side
to look at the wall of China.

In 1939 together with some German friends
they visited Poland
and the old town square in Warsaw,
looked at the armour
of the Teutonic knight Sigsmund II
and the cathedral of St. John.

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poem by Gert Strydom
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