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They know the answers
to every question you ask as you walk these halls,
every time you walk these halls. See,
there they are, standing around the chest-high wall
shielding the television screens on which, continuously,
films of experiments burn out of the dark
onto the inward eyes of visitors. See
they move silently between the tiny figures in the diorama
of the gas chambers of Auschwitz. There they are
wrapped around the ravaged Torah scrolls
inside the glass room, lit just enough for you to see
how beautiful they were. See, one angel
spends the rest of time weaving itself over and under,
over and under the stitches around one six-pointed star
on one striped woolen jacket, and another
sits silently in the corner of the Polish railroad car.
They are no more sad than Janusz Korczak walking
with his adopted children into the dark and naked room.
They are no more inclined to forget than the soldier
who closed the door behind Korczak. They are no more
able to stand themselves than the slave who,
for an extra bowl of putrid soup,
stacked corpses of his neighbors on steel racks
and fed them to the ovens so that
their ashes burned the heavens.
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