'ASHES', a poem by buddyblack

ASHES…….by Buddy Black, 2007

Ashes were falling
Like winter snow,
Yet people who saw it
Claimed not to know
That what they were seeing
Was human snow. And the boxcars came
And the boxcars went,
Having disgorged the souls
The devil sent
To stoke his evil fires of hell.
Hundreds,
Then thousands,
Then millions to come,
God only knows
The horrible sum.

And the bands played on
As the plan played out,
How could anyone person
Now have a doubt,
What this killing machine was all about.
Women and children
And babies all,
Young men, old men
Big and small.
Their screams and pleas
Fell on the devils mute ears.
And no cared to see their tears,
As The SS came in the middle of the night
To complete their deed
Before the break of light.
Time was more valuable
Than these wretched souls
Because the Final Solution
Was their driving goal.
They had no time
For hide n seek
Yelling and screaming
And killing the weak.
Individual men
With a common goal
Each man conspired
And each shared the role,
Of tormentor, of killer
Of human souls.
And the boxcars came
And empty they went
Having disgorged the souls
The devil sent.
Separated by gender
Young and old,
In line they waited
In the freezing cold,
While the SS stripped them
Of clothing and gold.
Dogs and whips
Forced the soon dead foreword
And they all knew by now
It was death they marched toward.
An SS doctor at the head of the line
Paid particular attention
To the sick and the dyin,’
And with the flick of a wrist
He sealed their doom
And sent them off
To the killing rooms.
Auschwitz, Belzec, Maidanek
And Treblinka, death camps,
work camps,
It mattered not which,
For their fate was sealed
As they faced their doom,
And were herded like sheep
Into the killing rooms.
By gas or by lead
It mattered not now,
They had no choice
As to when or to how,
It was simply a matter of time
They all would be dead.
This conspiracy of death
Passed down from the top
Like a snowball to hell
Near impossible to stop.
It soaked up the Jews
And the gypsies all,
The sick and the well,
The young and the old,
The big and the small.
Through the heat of the summers
And the biting stark cold
Mothers now knew
Their babes would never grow old.
And the boxcars came
And empty they went,
And soon the population
Was nearly all spent.
One million, Two million, Three million,
Four, Five million, Six million,
How many more!
The devil himself and all of his men
Could never put the world
Together again.
His bookkeepers and ledger men,
His SS and police,
Engineers and oilers,
And all who stood by
Then tried to think of a suitable lie,
Like ‘following orders was all that I did,
How was I to know
what the devil had bid’.
But the world and they all
Share this terrible guilt
For they each are a stitch
In this patch work quilt,
Woven with millions of human souls.
While ashes were falling
Like winter snow,
While ordinary men
killed ordinary people,
hoping the world would never know
that what they were seeing
was human snow.