Milosz Baffled Poem by John a'Beckett

Dust from the decimation.
Poland’s cities pummeled
Warsaw- flat. It’s lasting air
thick with questions nagging
Who would have predicted this?
Who foresaw- seven hundred years
of humanism smashed, and the Jews
rounded up, carted off., murdered. Whose
pen had recorded? What kindred ears
were alive to the pain. Poor Pole
or Poor Christian- what to call it?
Milosz looks at the Ghetto;
So many thousands dead.
What use an impotent silence?
Something had to be said.

But what he wanted it to say in a poem was always eluding him, riddle
As if between Skamander’s nice ideas of pure poetic form-
and the destruction of his city: stress of a blitzkrieg storm
between the aesthetic theories of the “Coffee-sipping Mystics”
and their fate as they became mere Nazi then Soviet statistics,
poetry of any kind in its brooding mood-stuck in the speechless middle:

Words like the buildings that housed them
once founded on civilized meaning
hardly meant much in this air dense
with ash and the endless-seeming
bombardment of human sense

Words with a song in their sound meant
to resonate once, now rang hollow, high
sentiment smashed of its noble feeling
and like the few human survivors
Poland’s deaths, her loss and her pain
Cripple in Milosz a way to explain.