Sticks and Bones

Sticks and Bones



Sticks and bones lying one on top the other

in mass grave.

Taut skin stretched over skeletal remains,

waxen faces and shrunken eyes with only

numbered markers to belie the holocaust left buried below.

Dirt bulldozed over someone’s Mother or Sister,

someone’s Father or Brother,

someone’s Child lost forever.

Never to be reclaimed.



My father stood in horror at what he saw that day

when first he marched through those gates—

“Work Will Set You Free”, it said.

Those young American soldiers were like Gods

in the eyes of those prisoners that day,

bursting through the gates

to set free woman and children and men

and babies born in captivity—.

what little life remained from Hitler’s fleeing regime,

from flame and bullet in quick attempt to exterminate

what evidence they could.



Everywhere soldiers overcome reeling out of control--

eviscerating cries filled the air

forced hard from throats in guttural tones.

This was like nothing they had ever seen, and they’d seen a lot..

Strong legs melt into jelly, men like rag dolls

crumpling to the ground. My father kneeling down

retched up his guts in the dirt.



Charred and blackened bodies frozen in position,

grasping towards freedom, mouths poised in last gasp.

A woman once breath-taking, still in her prime,

naked and suspended in a life sized jar—and

perfectly pickled in brine.

Household items made from flesh.

Wholesale humans more dead than alive,

hanging on by threads that were fraying,



in some slim hope they’d survive.

Many did succumb not used to that much love

like water and chocolate, whatever could be eaten

in desperate attempt to save their lives..



My father, someone’s hero, somebody’s savior,

arrived home safely at the end of the campaign

to champagne corks popping and ticker tape parades.

A little thinner, a lot older he stood as if

for the first time at his mother’s door.

Still something in him died in that blood bath war.

A liberating soldier in Patton's army,

he was silenced by all he’d seen.



I was a fortunate one born too late for these atrocities,

born in America, the land of the free, home of the brave.

My father for years, brave, not free kept his secret buried within.

As a child, I’d beleaguer him often about where he’d been

or what he did in the great war.

Refusing answers, his face would darken. 

He’d become vague, distant, not like my father,

never once disclosing the gaping wound inside.

I had no perception of the hero he’d been.

There were those days that went on and on, and black.

clouds in the shape of an anvil would gather momentum

just above his head—you could feel it, a change in the weather

a chill in your spine.  One learned quickly

to speak quietly or stay hidden for fear of his thunder—

he was still a prisoner locked behind



that damn gate that lied. 

No one, not Jew or Gypsy or soldier was ever free again,

at least in this life.



I wish I knew then what cards I’d been dealt,

I could have figured some of those mysteries out,

why my obsession with that horrid war and all those

tortured people—was I that girl in the jar, 

that girl that imprinted this man?

I have these memories I can’t explain, the music,

the streets in Europe, that particular place and time.

Do I have her memories and did I follow this man home?
A post war child born to a family that writes—

in line to the author of Ben Hur.

What irony.  Questions without answers taunt me,

blow in the wind



I became a Jew before I knew about my hero dad

and for a time in Israel lived.

Maybe I lived out that girl’s freedom, witness

to her splendid dream for a country and a people,

for joy-filled laughter and family and a place to begin;

and I swear I’m going to tell her story again and again,

the same one my mother told me after my father died.



The irony never stops, here’s what cancer does—

it has the same look.  Shrunken skin

over bones, waxen hollow face.

I viewed what was left for the last time

as my father laid in his bed, an empty shell of a man.

At last, my father liberated from behind that damn gate.



Two months after he died, I met him again in my sleep.

“Sweetheart, you must not worry about me,

I’m free!”he said.