Lenore Rosenberg
In the Mirrors of a World War II Memorial

The sky in the mirror during the thunderstorm is black like the smoke
from Auschwitz Chambers IV and V.

Fine, seared, dust-like swarms of mites darken the air, char the stratosphere over the
camps, mingle with the currents. Winds swirl them round the globe, matter,
infinitesimal, perpetual.

Raizele rises up too, she stares out of a photograph with her adored, dashing bruder
and wears a cloche at a jaunty angle, she with the eyes and the heart
of Pavlova.

Her eyes unchanging, she dances her Dying Swan, interned in Oswiecim. Her wraith
flies up and fuses with the other millions, swimming in the ionosphere, 
never and always here.

She was the one who wrote the cards, yellowed now, in India ink, to her liebe bruder.
15 Reichsmark postcards saying that the packages of food and geld came          
or didn’t.

The cards bear approval stamps from the German Political Authority, crowned by a
squared, black eagle with its head and four-pronged claws.
Unlike the Golden Eagle of Kansas, with sunshine feathers on its head and yellow feet.
A peaceful pose.

The Kansan eagle glides over the prairies on that Lord’s Day in 1944, when Evin
Humboldt enlists. He leaves the drought in his wheat field
and flies on the dust clouds 
to France.

Swift Evin flees the clutch of mortar, machine-guns, bare trees. White blankets hide
him on train tracks.
Three full years after Raizele’s final jeté in the showers, he yields to the embrace
of a grenade.