When an opponent declares “I will not come over to your side” I calmly say “Your child belongs to us already…What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.” -Adolf Hitler As I fell down in the covers And lay in wait for sleep, The shapes on the floor were an era Some seven decades deep And into the back of my eyelids I felt the ages climb And spring a trap on the roadway Before the hooves of Time And I marched for jeering Germans In one eternal row And tripped on an unhealed ankle Face down in the Polish snow, And the black boots beat like centuries On the days of my Jewish face And a soldier went for a tree branch And broke it like my race And Mama said to Papa “He is no longer mine” And the blood poured out on the snowbank Like cold communion wine In the cup of a father praying For Hans away at war While the golden tooth of the miser Ached for the other poor Decades away in a desert Beneath the Davidian sun Where the Jew who has built them a Ghetto Is glad to hold a gun And the settler has the harvest Hauled in by Arab men And reads “If I forget thee O Jerusalem...” Now Time spoke up on its haunches Holding my heart at bay: “My life is not your spirit, O dweller of today! Yes mankind is mere seasons That come and go and gyre, And what is the green of summer But fuel for the autumn’s fire? But salt will give no sugar Through any throttled sieve, So sit and count your blessings. They are not yours to give.” So I made my only duty to live and work and eat, but the son of the slave is a tyrant and bombs break out in the street.