Poetry of Healing and Renweal
Reiki Magazine, The Online Publication of the Reiki University

Holocaust Psalm

Those who wrote their names
In Smoke
As the burning of their bones
Lit our skies
For an Instant
For all Time

Their ashes fall
on my shoulders...
I singe my fingers
In the tracery of their Golden Names
On crackling curtains
of lambent flame

I taste the remnant
of their bondage
In an acrid memory
of a fallow wind

I hear twelve million blessings
ignominiously cut off
by words of hatred--

---Separation---

Sewn, for generations, into children's ear's...
Reaped on the threshing room floor
of the
Crematoria

I see the Slayer who reigns
at midnight
Vanishing at Soul's First Light
He is Cain, again,
licked by the flames
of his own Infamy
He is thine, and mine,
and we must claim him kindred
and release him
before we Light the final Cenotaph
(to all the Innocents)
Within the Heart of Peace

© 1994 Ellen Louise Kahne
(an original handwritten copy of this poem was accessioned into the permanent collection of The Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C.)

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