Holocaust Stone - Hyde Park. (April 15th, 2005)

1.

You were not one of a nice round number.
You were liberated and no one knows
how you made it to his door.
Were you carried or rolled,
wheel-chaired along by the hands of the unnamed,
lifting you over the potholes in the roads?
I looked at a map,
at the lines you may have travelled
from Belsen to the canals of Amsterdam.

You were not one of a nice round number, who
died in the weeks after, shocked by their own
freedom, still shot by the guards on the watchtower,
still hunted by each other for morsels of food or
shrapnel shards of pencil lead or
partial scraps of paper.
On April 15th, you were not one of
the 17,000 more who need to die.

When the British found you, did you cry?
Were there still experimental tears
left in the ducts of your eye?
History's tears make their journey
to the oceans of the map and
this paper that I have in reams.

2.

He had travelled with Anne Frank's Dad in a truck to Auschwitz -
he was one of a nice round number to be freed.

Had a key to a canal side door.
No one knows what his skin and bones must have felt,
sat perhaps,
waiting behind a safe Dutch door,
his eyes - hers, covering every molecule of wall,
ceiling, floor.
No one knows if he had company or
if he wanted it at all.

It must be that he grew stronger.
The network must have pulled him in;
collected, like the debris from a terrorist attack,
the Diaspora of shattered souls and minds
that were roaming,
like blue phantoms across the map.

No one knows how you, months later,
made it to his door,
to sit unrecognised a while - perhaps to remember
the unused muscles of a smile..
No one knows, but he.