A minute before the Bomb someone dies in a hospital
Together the death of an Era.
Postmen deliver letters without answers,
Someone sets a clock that will stop,
Children play in the streets
Happy they won't get old.
Women bear orphans without future.
Followers of a funeral that will last forever...
__________________
* Poem selected to World Poetry/1992 by the International Writers Association/USA.
CRIMES
Sale of the fat of the dead
In the Lyons religious struggles, century XVI,
Slaughter of children, elders, women
Of the Reign of Basan ordered by Moses,
Holocaust of 6.000.000 of jews,
Whole germanic tribes
Decimated by Caesar,
Idem redskins tribes by the American Army,
Sparta: the sport of hunting slaves,
Killing of children for sale of transplanted organs,
Women for being women
Burned as sorcerers by the Inquisition,
Indians of Caribbean generating children in slaves
To eating them,
Babies crushed against the wall
Customary in the antiquity in the conquered cities,
The creation of Man...
YUGOSLAVIA
Ao Dr. Krishna Srinivas
During the war everybody fled the town
Leaving behind mental defective children alone in madhouses...
Minds abandoned by reason
And so abandoned are the little bodies now.
O Pindar, if Man is a dream shadow,
These beings are the invisible shadow...
How to imagine beings like us in other planets?
Nothing can be
Like our miserable life in the universe.
WAR PHOTOGRAPH
Bombing in Singapore
Mother cries her dead son - bombs.
30 years leave passed... I don't know, o mother, where you are.
I only know that mourning will touch us forever.
Tears after dropping from the eyes
They belong to every man.
LAST DIALOGUE
- I will neither cry nor pray for you, my son:
You go to the war to kill other mother's children...
- O mother! I know how great your heart is,
I felt inside your body!
JEW *
Not from today, but from millenniums
You knew architecture of all prisons of the world!
Your tears were driven out by the wind of all climates!
Tied in assyrians vehicles, fettered in egyptian caravans,
In the subterranean caves of roman circus, in inquisitions jails!
In concentration camps!
Dispersed homes, strangers in your own original land!
Dying in mass or alone!
Members and eyes plucked out!
Burnt in ghettos and stakes!
Crucified, tortured, poisoned!
Devoured by wild beasts!
Thrown into the sea, deserts, cold steppes!
In gas chambers, in order to be shot dead!...
Nobody has ever seen the smallest piece of sky the ceiling of so many prisons!
Nobody has ever understood it better!
Nobody has ever felt so many kinds of death!
Nobody is closer to the immortality!
Nobody has ever looked for God in so great and millennial danger!
Nobody has ever deserved to be the Elected People more than you.
__________________
* This poem is registered in Holocaust Museum of Jerusalem.
TO THE UNKNOWN CIVILIAN
Why not build a monument
To the Unknown Civilian?
Who nourished Genghis Khan's hordes?
Anibal mercenaries, the invasive armies?
Who was forced to give his harvest,
His home, his children, his wife?
Who has lost every war?
AUSCHEWITZ ORCHESTRA
To Rabbin Henry Sobbel
In war against Sicily, only athenian people
Who could recite Euripides was saved from condemnation.
In concentration camp, only the jewish who could play an instrument
Were saved, so that they could entertain guards and prisoners.
More than harmony in playing,
There was harmony among musicians hiding their complaints and emotion,
While seeing their brothers going towards extermination.
Beautiful chords mixing in the air
With the smoke from crematoria.
O God! If you exist,
I neither ask you for Paradise nor Immortality,
Might only Holocaust have never existed.
WAR CINEMA
In a Polish village, Nazis
Imprisoned inside a cinema
Children, women, old and adult Jews.
A week of no bread and no water.
The greatest horror film of the world
The biggest attendance of the cinema.
At the end of the film
All spectators died.
They reran the film in a village of Kosovo.
They imprisoned all the residents in a house
And put it on fire.
They also reran the death of the spectators.
DACHAU
To hang little children...
How much tears came down
When came down hung corpses?...
To send adults to bath...
Undressing souls from bodies
Instead of water showers to spout gas!
Separating mothers from children! men from wives!
To sterilize beings in order not to reproduce their breed!...
What did they do with the victims' scrape? Ornaments!
Ash-strays, trinkets of human's bones!
Lamps-shade made of human's skin...
Why is evil the millenary ornament of Man?
O Christ, You came to the world in the wrong Era!
O God, personally You should have come... not have sent your Son!
ANGELS OF WAR
Lay, falsified, corrupted, smuggled
Without being outlaws.
Falsified passports
Saving beings from the gas chamber,
In your lofts hid the pursued,
Lay about breed, religion, job
Pulling convicts out from the concentration camps,
Bribed guards in order to set prisoners free...
Dispersed in other countries other continents
Some day you will remember the horrors of war...
Softening your nightmlares with its images
Your saviors will save you again.
BEFORE THE HEROS' STATUES
The heroes of the fatherland!
If all the marbles glorifiers of the violence
Were turned into dust they would paly reflect
the dust stirred up in the battles.
All the melted bronze, all the ink spent in
books will never give a glimpse of -the blood
and tears poured. All the chink of the gold
won by the conquerors is a least rumor before
the clamor, the lament of the conquered!
It is not suffice the fear of death and unknown,
Why to add the fear to the very brothers?
TERRORISM IN NEW YORK
Suicide plane crashes into building, blowing it up.
From higher floors someone desperately
jumps into space.
From another window a solitary arm
waves a handkerchief, asking for help.
Just a part of a body we cannot see,
will no longer see.
On the ground, the terrified crowd
sees, in two gestures, the summary
of human existence in the planet:
Those who hope to be saved and those
who have no hope in this life.
Passenger of suicide plane makes a cell phone call
To her husband to say she loves him.
She couldn't be saved, but she proved
That there could be love in the middle of so much hatred.
GOD'S SCALES
The Devil laughed: It would be the easiest victory, since he took Faut's soul.
He bet that if one weighed all of the altruists in comparison to the billions of
human beings who lived on Earth, the Creator would lose all of His Creation.
As the Devil was putting millions of human beings on one the scales, the Creator
was putting on the other dish those who thought about animals' suffering - Saint
Francis of Assisi. Those who tried to humanize criminals - Epitet, Becaria.
Those who fought to redeen slaves - Spartacus. Those who tried to expiate the
guilt of a civilization - Schweltzer. Those who helped the injured, the orphans,
the widows of war - Henri Dunant. Those who were sacrificed to save
Humanity - Jesus. Those who thought about a bunch of people who always work
hard and yet remain poor - Marx. Those who tried to give home to the
expatriate - Theodore Herzl. Those who sympathized with human
pain - Buddha. Those who preached the non-violence - Gandhi. Those who
exalted the opressed, such as women - Stuart Mill. Those employers who
demeaned themselves to exalt the subordinate - Agis, Cleomenes, Graccchus,
Tolstoi, Robert Owen. Those who searched for God's love by loving the
failed ones - William Booth. Those who took the blame for somebody
else - Tiradentes. Those who relieved and healed the sick - Pasteur,
Braille, Fleming, Sabin. Those who dreamed of a fraternal mankind -
Thomas Morus... Those who lost their freedom to free their brothers - Nelson Mandela.
"It is a cheat! This balance is false like everything you create, Lord", said the
Devil seeing the dishes in balance.
The Creator answered: "No, Satan. Each of these altruists is worth billions of men".