This Urn Contains Earth from German Concentration Camps

Plotzensee Memorial, West Berlin, 1984

Dark gray
the stone wall hangs
self-conscious wreaths
the heavy breath of gaudy Berlin roses
“The Vice Chancellor Remembers
The Heroic Generals of the Resistance”
and before a well-trimmed hedge
unpolished granite
tall as my daughter and twice around
Neatness
wiping memories payment
from the air.

Midsummer’s Eve beside a lake
keen the smell of quiet
children straggling homeward
rough precisions of earth
beneath my rump
in a hollow root of the dead elm
a rabbit kindles.

The picnic is over
reluctantly
I stand pick up my blanket
and flip into the bowl of still-warm corn
a writhing waterbug
cracked open her pale eggs oozing
quiet
from the smash.

Earth
not the unremarkable ash
of fussy thin-boned infants
and adolescent Jewish girls
liming the Ravensbruck potatoes
careful and monsterless
this urn makes nothing
easy to say.