Dos Oyg (Child victims in Belsen)

SSalted tears corrode the camera’s out-of-focus lens...


Five pairs of eyes
Peer from an oblong form.
One pair does not see ;
The pair at eleven o'clock, in the photo,
Looks down with heavy eyes,
Three-quarters closed, blank, staring
Into precious space,
Seeking nothing but love and eternity.

Some cheeks are full,
From blowing heaving kisses
Onto a silent prayer of numbness.
Frightened oblique eyes,
Situated at twelve o'clock on the print.
Sombre almond eyes,
Will follow other mournful tears
Down the one-way tunnel
To death.

Inside the posing mouths, the girls’ tongues
Will be dry and bitten and still.
The stares are reflected broken-glass shards,
And is targeting
At forty-five degrees
To the left,
Towards heaven.
Below this face
Is a smaller head
On a shorter body.
The mouth is defiant;
The lips pale blood-blue-red.

Across to the right of the photo
Large open eyes
Fidget side-ways,
Peering to the dark green peeling walls,
Parallel to the ten clenched hands,
Clenching air.

See --
Neatly placed tresses on a forehead,
Float to the front,
Beneath a chequered shawl
Lying restless, on doomed crowns.


Immediately at forty-five degrees
To the left on the photo
A worldly wizened baby-face
Stares at the lens,
That does not see beyond
Those purpled-stripped-rimmed eyes.
There is no smile from a yesterday,
No catching breath,
No expressions of love
As given to Grand-Pa last week;
Only an empty stare floats past,
The lower head with torn tuque.
Squeezed between the posing group,
A kepi tilts back at fifteen degrees
From the horizontal.
The head above the thin striped jacket
Is buttoned tight,
And the long lapels lie neatly
On a heaving-silent chest.
The lips say Amen.

The photographer smiles,
And five faces
Glue hurriedly into patterns
Of dead sticky bees
And wasted honeycombs.
To the edge of the photo frame,
Three degrees and five centimeters
To the exterior line,
Are two faces
One above the other,
Both in blurred contemplation.
The tired half-closed eyes
Stare out
To oblivion, in the camera’s range.
A boy’s large lean hand grips
His brother's narrow hips.
The long frail bony fingers
Pattern to the shoulder,
Touching the kepi-capped head.
The fingers trickle voluntarily
Onto a baby-head at three o'clock;
The head is oblong, round
And strange and large;
The fair hair appears thin
Tricks by the sympathising shaded light
Shining from the perpendicular
Yellow bulb,
Throbbing, throbbing
Its light onto the Children of Death.
The camera’s lamps do not warm
The waiting lips.


The faces try crying,
Desolation in the closed eye lids
Shows no emotion;
Only a dryness
And a cup-lid of ice.

The final expression in all five heads,
Is one of stillness and despair,
All despaired youth with no beginning.
And that noise...?
Is it the shutter
Of the lens?
No-- it is the click of the keys,
In Death's cold gates.


Look longingly.
Frame these positive, haunting faces
Of five children incarcerated behind wire fences,
Developing silent memories,
Before the photographer's eyes,
Copied onto the saturated flammable film
Camera clicks gone by for-ever.

(Yesterday
The picture on my wall was askew--
The faces obtuse, square and rectangular,
Like a gaudy Picasso print
Come to life.
An anonymous dry tear falls out of the photo,
Wets and burns my finger,
Then slides into an obtuse angle
Intersecting a line also parallel
To the youngest girl’s ear.

It is close to mid-week now.
The children move off slowly
At ten degrees Celsus
To Cold Death.)

Who will paste my photo
In their album?
Is there anyone...?


*The Eyes...