ŁOMAZY
I look into the picture, scrutinize the faces,
the harrowed, bent angle of the men's backs as they huddle
or squat, wait for some kind of night to fall. All of them wear
newsboy caps, wool jackets. There must be eight hundred
assembled here, on the school athletic field in the little town
of Łomazy. And then there are the uniformed soldiers
posted behind, in front, and to the side—their eyes tiny
black holes—Police Battalion 101. In the furthest
back row an officer stands wide stance, clutching
a leather whip. In a short amount of time, in the space
of a few minutes, really, some of the men will be marched
to the end of the town's streets, to the woods where
they will be given shovels and spades, ordered to dig.
In the next picture I count eleven men in a pit of their own
making. No longer wearing caps, stripped to their waists,
they throw dirt over their shoulders to the mounding piles
surrounding them. They are sweating as men do in the midday sun.
They are probably not aware that Lieutenant Gnade is taking
this photograph. But certainly the men understand that soon enough
they will be dead. Everyone will be shot in the back of the head
by the drunk-on-vodka Trawnikis who've been trucked in
from the Ukraine to spare the German soldiers nightmares.
I focus on one man whose trousers sag off his body. I can see
the white, narrow band of his underwear. He cannot know
that a woman is watching him sixty years in the future
from the safety of her bed. This man has no idea that his singular
figure will always be stooping, bending to the earth, as if he were
about to fall to his knees in prayer, and that I am joining him there.
[after reading Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen]
REHEARSAL FOR A COMING EXTINCTION
All over the world orchestras are warming up. No one
is very professional. The clarinets are squawking,
the flutes aren’t coming in on cue. The first bassoon
complains to the second while the violins can’t agree,
quarreling the air with sharps and flats, stirring up
a whirlwind. In the back, the kettledrums boom
next to the grief-stricken harp. And the conductor,
in diamond cufflinks and black tails, baton ticking time
on the podium, how can he possibly get everyone
on the same page, playing the score together?
He needn’t worry. The audience, a sea of upturned
faces, radiates bliss. Eyes glistening, old men,
old women, children, dogs, cats, barnyard beasts
believe the maestro knows what he’s doing, the world
just as it should be, as it always was. Beyond them,
unseen, without faith, wild animals crash through forests
shaking noise from their heads, running for their lives.
Moira Magneson calls the Sierra foothills home and taught English for many years at Sacramento City College. Prior to teaching, she worked as a river guide throughout the West. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals, including most recently the NewVerse.News, Persimmon Tree, Plainsongs, Canary, and California Fire and Water — A Climate Crisis Anthology.