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After Reading Reznikoff
When I think of those mothers giving up their children at the gates of the camps or choosing one over the other, or accompanying their youngsters to the showers of gas, when I think of that wrenching, that wailing, the force of those feelings, the terrible potency, the fear breaking their bodies in sweat and hives, the vomiting and shitting, the mindless lunging for their infants and toddlers, their sons and their daughters, when I think of that universe of last images, the eyes, the unspeakable eyes of mothers knowing, the backs of the children waddling away, being led away, being pulled away, recalcitrant curls, fallen hems, toys dropped on the gravel paths, the little waves, the dipped heads, the incessant weeping, when I think of the bleeding wombs of dying mothers, pleading mothers, the bellies of mothers with unborn babies, the breasts bursting with unsucked milk, when I think of the various ways the weather must have been—the cold crunch of snow, the flowery delight of early spring —when I think of the camps and the deaths of the Jews, the millions of Jews, I think of the mothers and their bodies, their childbearing bodies, their bodies following their children to death, I think of the noise of trains, the terror of trains, their engines cooling into inert steel, their clatter and steam, the scenes enacted in the railroad yard, and the trains remind me to think of the men, at last I think of all those men in their greatcoats and their boots, no children inhabiting their rational bodies, the mystery of it all, the bodies of the women so alive with emotion, the bodies of the men so dead to it all, I think not of God, desperately I try to not think of God, my good, great God neither woman nor man, circling above in heartbroken panic, the beating of wings, the cacophonous suffering, the pungent cloud rising of dark, dark feeling that silenced even Him.
Kate Daniels
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:hi:
RL
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