REMEMBERING GAZA
Hitler – to avenge the assassination
of Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich Protector
of Bohemia and Moravia,
and one of the Holocaust’s chief architects
– ordered the isolated mining village
of Lidice (twenty miles from Prague)
to be razed, and males over fourteen shot.
The women and children were deported
to Chelmno and gassed. The barbarism
is still echoing around the world.
The Nazis en route to capture the oil fields
of Baku, besieged Stalingrad, blitzed it
with bombs and artillery then entered –
only to be shot at by snipers from each
windowless tenement and rubble-strewn
courtyard. Winter came, and the cannon-fodder
battalions of the Russian Army.
The Germans – outnumbered corpse for corpse,
surrounded, cold, starving – surrendered.
When the remaining Jews in the Warsaw ghetto
discovered the truth about the trains to the east,
about their destinations, and the purpose
of those destinations, those who were not yet
too traumatised by humiliation
and hunger felt able to resist.
Between them they mustered six revolvers
and built an arsenal of Molotov cocktails
and bits of masonry. They resisted
the Wehrmacht and the SS for four months,
and received no help from the Allies.
And, no, no parallels are being drawn
or analogies being made, only echoes
being heard. Lidice was a war crime,
Stalingrad a rout, The Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising nemesis. Lidice’s ruins
have been preserved as a memorial,
Stalingrad re-built then renamed again,
the razed ghetto’s borders marked in remembrance.
The Third Reich lasted for barely a hundredth
of its vaunted one thousand years, and never
reached the oil fields beside the Caspian.
Under the sea floor off the Gaza Strip,
and in Gaza itself, far, far below
the tunnels, and in the West Bank,
are oil and natural gas deposits,
enough to make all the peoples between
the river and the sea comfortably off –
unless or until the whole earth were
to become unliveable.
Tim Ellis
January 26, 2024A sad indictment of humankind, but let’s not forget there are also millions of people working in the interests of peace, healing, and common sense. What a complicated species we are!
Branwell Johnson
January 26, 2024Excellent, David.
Clive Watkins
March 2, 2024Belatedly, David, I have read the set of poems you posted on 25 January. What a powerful set they are! You employ with great force your customary technique of juxtaposition – despite your disclaimer, your redefinition of the technique, in these lines (from this poem, “Remembering Gaza”): “And, no, no parallels are being drawn / or analogies being made, only echoes / being heard.” An echo is the reflection of an initial utterance, distorted by the surface it bounces back from and returning to the speaker. It is therefore a doubled thing, carrying something of the original information, but also information added by the reflecting surface itself. In some cases, in bouncing off more than one surface, the echo may be complex and recursive. It also suggests a quasi-dialogue. The original incident utters its cry. The cry is returned, echoing off other incidents that may or may not be analogous and which therefore may be thought of as speaking back to it. The reader is both the over-hearer of this quasi-dialogue and, in being himself a reflecting surface, a contributor to it. This seems to me how a successful Selzer poem commonly works. Its effect on a reader is to awaken thought and arouse feelings. Not a negligible outcome.