ILSE LASKER SCHULER


A poet self exiled
from Germany
once a citadel
of musical Kultur
undaunted in banishment
from the Assyrian hordes
on horseback
breaching the walls,
then one sunny
but pitiless day
a new mortuary
long in the making
of twenty centuries,
with dens cohabited
by finger printed
and appointed guards
with Party cards
a den of iniquity built up
branch by leafless branch
by half -baked historical
and rhetorical beasts
recalled by outfaced thugs
"National Socialism"
stashed and cashed
with trilling criminals
by closed
undisclosed windows
breathing out terrible air
of murderous rhetorical ink
on the very brink
of Moloch fires and ash,
Ilse, your voice sipping
from the same cup
of bitterness
drunk by the nations
culminating in tragedy
by deliberate
death chambers,
you escape a buried spot
in the somber winds
of Jerusalem.