Ghost Children

Poems, published by Ronsdale Press, Summer 2000

Excerpts below.

Insomnia

The tooth of night
pierces my flowering dream
a black sunflower
bleeds inside my head

Child Survivors
For the Child Survivors of the Holocaust

I drift among you my brothers and sisters
a shadow of myself, a wisp of memory,
recycling fragments of an anguished past .

In this room we recall as in a seance our former selves
denied a childhood

Your voices come out of the cellars
and the attics of time, and frozen nightmares –
murmurings that stir even these foreign walls
with sounds of guns and death rattling
in the camps and the ghettoes that God forgot
and in His forgetfulness left us with a ghostly memory.

You, my sister, recall your shame
for having stolen bread
when your body ached with hunger’
and you my sister with helpless anger
watched a sibling die
and you my brother lived in hiding without your parents
while you my brother died in Auschwitz

No childhood for us then
No schools no gardens with a dog and cat
No neat kitchens with mothers baking cakes

Only time’s catacombs, where we play hide and seek,
sustain our memories

– Lillian Boraks Nemetz