Written by Paul Gardner
November’s cold opaque memory;
Fingertips pressed bloodless,
On today’s transparent light,
A perpendicular hate engraved,
The day belonging to no-one.
Fear, in valleys, inverted wisps,
Pierced by level rays of sun
Melt with the speed of light.
Never Again, never, whispers Jacob,
Friends, old hands, clasp ancestral ash;
His own number liberated in the nick of time,
Though barbed wire haunts like soul-lodged shrapnel.
Never, Never Again! The covenant,
Inscribed by frail hands, in shadows,
Smoking putrid, the stench of ideology:
Dachau, Treblinka, Auschwitz- our curators
To revile Revisionism.
Here the indomitable burned with life.
Where grass mourns death’s contagion,
Six million souls and more, danced macabre
In Europe’s twilight, to marching songs.
Never, never, Never Again! Incants the old man,
Alone in the bus shelter,
Numb palms pressed against glass.
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Originally from the UK and now living in Western Australia, Paul Gardner is a poet, author and educator. He was awarded a PhD for his study of writer identity and compositional processes and teaches English at Curtin University. He is co-founder of Poetry of Resistance, an emerging movement that brings people together to create poetry that speaks back to power. Follow Paul at Inst. paul_gpoetacademy