HELPLESSNESS Poem by Ewa Lipska

The life which he was bequeathed
as grandma used to say
what kind of inheritance is that anyway?

He drags behind him days
He'd rather not have known.
A concentration-camp childhood.
Barbed-wire toys.

A suitcase from those days
airmailed
still pretends to be a bird.

He's been living on borrowed time one might say
he's managed to survive.

Till the end he will remain in his own
minority.

Who could make sense of that. Even God
asking for a light in the park's mortgaged darkness
is just helplessness which turns to dust.