[The Montana Professor 17.2, Spring 2007 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Robert Pack
We need hope to survive, we need a goal
that's reachable on our own fragile earth,
acceptance of each other if not love,
stirred by the consolations art can bring,
remembering the sorrows we have seen,
remembering the harm we each have done.
Yet how impersonal our weapons are:
we cannot know who gets obliterated
in a flash; their childhoods and their loves
must be retold to make them permanent.
The TV broadcasts of whatever war
is in the news are meant to entertain
not to appall; we are not shown the face
of anguished death as Homer chanted it
to his awed listeners who understood
the irony that brash Achilles' shield,
made by a god, could not postpone his death
or bring his friend back from his crusty grave.
The storied past endures, and so I can
still picture when the Holocaust commenced:
the riots now recalled as Kristallnacht
for all the smashed-in doors and shattered glass
the Nazis and the looting citizens
strewed in the Jewish stores: the bakeries,
the groceries, the gleaming candy shops,
as neighbors grabbed whatever didn't burn,
their friendships wiped out in indifference
once thought unthinkable.
The Jews who saw
that worse was yet to come sought to escape,
although some stayed--the pianist Birkenfeld
who organized an orchestra in Lodz,
right in the ghetto's smoking heart, performed
Schubert and Beethoven, trying to cheer
the victims in discord as if they could
appeal, if not to absent God, at least
to rousing music that might still express
the hope for unified humanity.
But then the ovens of the Holocaust
occurred and these atrocities must be
recorded with the rest, though how dare one
speak openly of the unspeakable;
it happened and forever will remain
a part of human history for those
who choose not to forget. We all have seen
the spectral bodies bulldozed into graves,
nameless and irretrievable beyond
what power we have to grieve, beyond remorse,
beyond what sacred pity can reclaim.
And now at home, in my worn leather chair,
I'm listening enthralled to Beethoven
on speakers whose benign technology
can make the music sound as if I were
attending a live concert like the one
at death-defying Lodz, although some wish,
some incredulity, tells me I'm safe,
no swastiked police patrol the streets,
no missiles streak across the bludgeoned sky
toward Tel Aviv, Hebron, Jerusalem.
But if I'm wrong--the end will come, and if
it's thinkable that even memory
will not survive beyond that final flash,
I hope I will be able in that pause,
in that last instant, to compose myself
and turn the volume up to hear the swell
of Beethoven's Third Symphony, the chords,
contained as a crescendo in my mind,
defiant and triumphant chords that rise
and drift out in the silent emptiness
of unredeemable indifference.
[The Montana Professor 17.2, Spring 2007 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]