(Kurt Gerron)
Dark corners in a gloomy hall,
The door beyond the shadowed wall,
Where you wander beyond it all
No stage, no lights, no applause.
Your bulky shadow shades to night.
You have moved beyond the fight.
The chamber is now bathed in light.
Look up and see the naked stars.
You can’t erase the hopeless eyes,
The heaps of flesh, the swarms of flies,
Yet, help them with their ghastly lies,
To live another day and starve.
Fat man, now, so big and small,
Haunt the endless ghetto hall.
The victims that around you fall
Hostage to your desperate role.
Your name once bright is now but drear
Because you gave yourself to fear.
A fool as mad as old King Lear
Or, Iscariot, confused and doomed.
The day before the chambers closed
You stood in line to be disposed.
On one last awful stage you posed
Your final scene in ashes clothed.
Your memories of
gladder times
Mack the Knife, Threepenny rhymes.
Now rot below the dust of lime
Ten million phantoms crowd the seats.
Bouquets of flesh and whitened bone,
Thrown to the stage of broken stone
Where you play endless and alone,
To maelstrom moans, eternal cries.
A very somber portrait.. I had to Google this man,and then found that your poem, already powerful, becomes heartbreaking. Evil reverberates though out the decades and centuries. My faith is that, in the end, He will wipe away every tear.
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