Missing

We are smoke, invisible ash in your hair,
dust on your skin, we outstare you from photos
mute; you have to work to unravel our stories,
exhume our communities, now graves. We are mist,
your lost people, but some of us never lived nor died,
the children never born to sisters, uncles, aunts
war-torn from this family book. We are memory
- a bowl, a wedding ring, a child's boot, all looted
but remain while we have no physical shape.
We are the past, we wrap you in provocative arms:
letters flung from cattle trucks shunting to Auschwitz
flutter like leaves; diary fragments bud underground;
a poem unfurls in a field of teeth; here 836,255 dresses
are stored in a heap, each with a story of how it
arrived. We are the missing tribe in your dreams
of feasts. We are the empty chairs, the family
trees ending suddenly, in silence. We are sighs,
a horror on the map, vomit on the tracks,
pulled through these postcard-pretty towns
to Dachau, Belzec, Belsen, Treblinka
wrapped in a prayer shawl, a rug, a mountain
of blankets, knowing we are not coming back.
We are shadows, raus, get out, schnell! We
flicker at the edges, almost glimpsed in these
grey thoughts on grey days. We are light, we
echo in this family likeness, these repercussions
through time, a ripple, history will repeat,
no, will repeat, no! We are history, a ghetto,
a factory, a labour camp, a mine; we are
ghosts, we are your missing people, we have arrived.

© Jacqueline Mézec

(This poem was commissioned in 2003 by the Holocaust Memorial Day Organising Committee in Jersey for Holocaust Memorial Day 2004.)

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