Primo Levi Among Schoolchildren Poem by Lionel Abrahams

At honoured Yeats's age
(sixtyish, but no romantic senator
abstracted by the beauty of some child)
thrust by duty into alien classrooms,
soft-spoken Levi lectured on his geography -
those innocents' own world,
its nature scorched, toxic, perilous.

Even after the stairwell's throat
had gulped him into silence,
that gentle chemist's precise legacy
should have alkalized
acids of Adolf...
invalidated the fulminator's
cataclysmic formulae...
left finally futile the fuehrer's
fury's aktion upon
the soft combustible
world's balloon....

But the children couldn't
hear him.