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Ein Kampf (Other) by Sasha When an opponent declares âI will not come over to your sideâ I
calmly say âYour child belongs to us alreadyâ¦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.â
-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
âHe is no longer mineâ
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 âIf I forget thee
O Jerusalem...â
Now Time spoke up on its haunches
Holding my heart at bay:
âMy 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 autumnâs fire?
But salt will give no sugar
Through any throttled sieve,
So sit and count your blessings.
They are not yours to give.â
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.
Up the ladder:
Back Slidin'
Down the ladder:
In my train-IN
Votes: (green: user, blue: anonymous)
Arithmetic Mean: 6.0
Posted: April 22, 2007 5:34 AM PDT; Last modified: April 22, 2007 5:34 AM PDTWeighted score: 5.119203 Overall Rank: 5782 Comments:
[n/a]
Dental Panic @ 84.27.244.4
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22-Apr-07/3:33 PM
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Reply
better not have kids, then.
You need a better, more original approach to this.
That and.. oh yeah, the nazi/holocaust poem is over done to the extreme. Another thing: Unless you actually lived and endured that rather grim period as a Jew in Germany, I find all artistic expression dressed thus to be abortive. Horridly fruitless rather...
Please tell me you don't actually think this is a Holocaust poem. If you do, then read it again, by which I mean actually pass your eyes over each stanza.
And Mama said to Papa
âHe is no longer mineâ And the blood poured out on the snowbank Like cold communion wine 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 Oh, oh! And that stupid Hitler quote. I'm sorry, was there some deeper meaning hidden underneath the fucking flora of references to WW2 and Jewish ghettos and tyrants, slaves... I'm sorry woman, like I said before: Trim away the fuckin extra hubris, and the entire approach you took, because as it should be obvious-- YOUR INTENTIONS HAVE FAILED, because they have no room in the colors presented in this poem. That is all, Madam.
I do need to spell it out for you, don't I: Nazi Germany= suffered from roughly the same motivations driving Israel's policy of apartheid.
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 âIf I forget thee O Jerusalem...â Please, for god's sake, READ THE THING.
I did. Again, the conflicting images over-run the other pieces. Do you not get what I'm saying? For gods sake? It's simply that which I'm trying to say with my criticism.
I read the entire thing, again, that is not the problem. If I don't read it, I don't bother commenting on it. And If I really didn't like the -attempted- message, I would have already proffered up my ranker zero. Do yourself a favor: Relax.
And another thing, my personal experience and/or lack thereof have *nothing* to do with what is and isn't appropriate for me to write about, as if art had anything to do with sincerity. (For the record, I'm 20, so I'm obviously not a Holocaust survivor.) You needn't assume that I'm trying for outright confessionalism.
You don't like the subject and/or the comparisons made. Fine. That has little to do with the actual artistry of the poem. And, by the way, Poland isn't in Germany.
I had not said it to be innappropiate for you to write whatever mush you wish to spew.
I simply stated that I, in no way, take it seriously or with sincerity, unless you were similarly or actually persecuted in such a manner. And about Poland? No it isn't Germany.. but for a time missy? It was part of Germany. That's why the British got into the mix in the first place. "Breeding room." Capiche?
Oh, and I'm male.
Well, here in the yank pot, sasha is a girl name. Not common for me to run into male sasha's here at home.
But it's really minor, my comments still apply, gender assumptions reversed, of course.
What does sincerity have to do with the merits/demerits of poetry?
Where and when did I mention anything such as the broad topic of the merits/demerits of poetry?
I didn't. I simply said that is how I approach such poems, and I have my reasons, they are mine, but in no way did I say it applies in that broader sense, or claim it to be absolute. Oh. Relax?
A whole lot, if you write a lot. And while most of yours are translations of otherâs art, the ones you do write MUST show sincerity or you will be considered fake in the long run.
Thatâs probably the truest thing Hitler said. Apparently youâre a Jew looking back at the holocaust, or empathizing with them, and considering the present Gaza. âThe son of the slave is a tyrantâ rings with less than sincerity. How are Jews the sons of slaves?
I'm an atheist, the son of a Russian emigree to the US and a black man from Baltimore. Or maybe I'm a wild Zulu. Anyway, I'm not a Jew.
Many of the Ashkenazim in Israel are the children and grandchildren of holocaust survivors or at least Jews who were turned into a disenfranchised underclass in their home countries. The irony is that they are doing the same thing to the Arabs whose land they now inhabit. whence: "the son of the slave is a tyrant." For example, Tel Aviv university is built on the ruins of a demolished village. The tactics used in the british mandate by such zionist groups as Lehi and Irgun (which, incidentally, was the first organization ever to systematically employ car-bombs) are chillingly remeniscent of the terror tactics of the early days of German anti-semitism.
But the holocaust eclipses everything. Even when you try to express yourself on this topic. So, why did you entwine the approach?
That's why I say you need a better approach. And I'm done for today. Peace.
The Holocaust does not eclipse everything. Worse things have happened like:
Stalin's Purges (between 20 and 50 million dead. Giving Old Joe the benefit of the doubt, that's *at least* well over three times the number of jews killed in the holocaust, and more than twice the number of holocaust victims altogether.) The plague The conquistadors. (Whole civilizations, languages and peoples destroyed.) Many many others.
But who remembers Stalin? Not the average laman. But they do remember Hitler.
That and none of this has anything to do with your poem, which, with its context, the Holocaust does eclipse it.
Moreover, it's really hard to talk about cataclysmic relativity when you've actually been *in* the occupied territories and had a street boy chasing you for 20 minutes begging not for money but for a bottle of water. (Yes, this did actually happen to me. Look: sincerity!)
Alright, I'll grant you sincerity. But the Jews have not been slaves for centuries, except under Hitler. and to call them tyrants is like calling the French tyrants when they returned to France after the occupation. âIf I forget thee O Jerusalem...â has been their cry since the long-ago deportation to Babylon. It's a good poem, and I understand it better for your explanation.
They have, in fact, been slaves for centuries. What were they when Moses lead them out of Egypt? Somehow I doubt Pharaoh was paying them $5.15 an hour.
Tyranny is tyranny, regardless of its justification. Unlike the French, who simply returned to a land that had been taken from them within living memory (I should also add that the French today don't make religious homogeneity a prerequisite for citizenship,) the Zionists actually attempted to assert a claim over a land they hadn't had sovereignty over for well over a thousand years! It *is* tyranny to force people to violate their own religious practices (Ariel Sharon's crap with the Dome of the Rock), to impose your religious code on a population against its will (stores being criminalized for remaining open on the Sabbath), to demolish other people's land for the sake of a religiously justified manifest destiny and it is tyranny to suppress legitimate freedom of speech. (Imprisoning camera men for filming the Israeli police's abuses of power.) I've had Israeli friends hospitalized after shock grenades, fired from police cannons, exploded at their feet. Their only crime was peaceful demonstration. This is not comparable to anything the french did after WWII, and I'm having quite a visceral reaction to that comparison.
The Jews were slaves in Egypt under the Pharaoh, and again in Babylon and Syria. That was a long time ago, not in living memory as you say. So the comparison with France is a matter of time. Admittedly, the French did not displace a people upon their return, as the Jews did in 1946. Most of the citizens of Israel today are only moderately religious; their sometimes abuse of Arabs is mostly otherwise motivated. Still, tyranny is tyranny. But answer this: if Israel laid down all its weapons, what would happen?âannihilation of Israel. If the Arabs laid down all their weapons, what would happen?âpeace. You can have the last word on this if you want; Iâm going to bed. Youâve brought some good arguments.
Well...
slaves to tradition slaves to the cult of the chosen. slaves since they had been slaves .. like how many times? Egyptians, Babylonians.. Romans.. In the essence, they are descendants of slaves.. long ago they served under whips. Now nobody get bloody fucking defensive. I didn't form their history. That aside, now they came after the holocaust, made use of global guilt, and fucking invaded a land that had been established shortly after the jews were driven out of Israel, and the massive spread of Islam. In fact, this is what? A few thousand years of established residence? Not only that, Israel makes claim to legitimacy based on a wholly religious BELIEF. The belief that for whatever reason god gave his bloody chosen some shit-hole desert area, and since that is so their claim is fucking sacred and holy... oh, wait, how would a Muslim interpret that whole premise of invasion? He would have more than enough reason to keep up his brutal Jihad. It's down to a basic analogy: Say the indians decide to reclaim the United States? Do they have legitimacy? I'd say so.. weren't they here first?... But anyway.. I'm done ranting. Peace.
Mrs Sasha. I do like this, 'mankind is mere seasons' and 'the son of the slave is a tyrant' how different characters play out the same scenarios. The poem is not arbiter on a historical dispute it examines how we abuse power when it is given to us.
A couple of nits. Blood is warm so not like cold communion wine. Perhaps like communion wine poured into a cold communion cup. And the last line is the worst of the poem by a mile it is so banal. 'So sit and count your blessings. They are not yours to give.' is rather peculiar because presumably there is nothing wrong with blessed people sharing their good fortune with others.
I am not sure what this would do to the rhythm but one suggestion I would give to you is to cut the superfluous words. You use the word and and so a lot but you do not always need them, and your poem seems more forceful, clean, and direct without them.
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