Seven Days Of Ashes Poem by Alan Patrick Traynor

Day 1
Murder

I am an Order
Nothing else

The deep
Thin lines
The striped buried face
The uniform of measured bars
Walking
Waiting

I am an experiment
The schizophrenic moth
The burrowed raven’s face
The hole that mocks
The floor

I am the skeleton mother
A voice that reads the grave
The borrowed sharpened flint
The moving horns
Of day

I am a needle
That carries no blood

So
Speak the dead

The albino crow
Whose feet without shoes
Into teeth of every hole

So
Speak the dead

And I never made it home!

I am an Order
Nothing else

And I was married
In the broken glass
Of the smoking sun
The tightened thread
That hatched the Ghetto’s breeze

And all I can do is hold onto the floating sun
Because forever sky is drowning

And all I can do is peel back the rowing moon
Because forever hands are howling

And when it comes
I am blackout

A wedding of ashes
That blows high the towel

Lanced are the clouds
That hold the face of love

And we flew into the earth that way
Down into the core
And we pulled out our thoughts
Through the worm’s forever missing laughter

Down into the core
Will you remember
What is half
Like I do

When Heaven is late
Horrid are the broken limbs of earth
The bulbs
The ground
Our feet

And never before
Has the hand that holds the sun
Behead the core

Oh season’s blade
So beats the thousand folds
So brutal

Oh wiry stars
Will you lift me up
Into my half
Into the something
Way-out after

Seven are the flames
That cut the weeks into your feet
Oh boiling hands
So blazing

And born wide open
Was the robin
That was hidden
Beneath the eyelids
Of the moon

Into our ashes
Our Apocalypse
That rains
So slowly upwards

So born was I
Will I
Burn so softly die

And die

Onto the bellowed moan
So upward goes the rain
That never
Made it home

Oh God
Forgive me
I am dead!

In your resting throne
The melting wood
That burns
The knot in snow

And die

Onto the ground
Onto the broken bones
Onto Love’s lost mote forgiveness

Into the fields of confiscation
The horrid hands
The broken glass
The inhumanity of stones our constellations

So rakes the mountain of flesh and sky
Upon the abacus that rose like bones

We are the beautiful
The horrific beauty
And we are dead

We are the hair
That crossed your hands

The rain that burnt your eyes
For seven days

I am cloth
I am Heaven
I am wire

Murder!
There was no second day


Auschwitz


...Never the last word