LAMENTATIONS
5
(the
first Hebrew word in the 5th chapter of Lamentations is זכר
ZaKHoaR, remember)
I
Score
O’ Lord
what
has befallen us,
feel
and share our recent shame.
Anatevka's
gone to the dogs;
our
synagogues
are
Soviet museums.
A
generation's orphaned
of
our Father, leaving us
widows'
fears and survivors' guilt.
II
We've
paid the train ride to our own cremations;
we've
literally dug our own graves.
We’re
up to our necks
in
ghettos and gallows:
even
in labor camps
we’re
worked to our bones.
And
where the Axis let us flee,
the
Allies turned us back.
III
Our
fathers took religion
as
the air they breathed:
so
now we gasp for breath in chambers
of
horrors forewarned in your forgotten book.
The
subject Slavs enslaved us,
happy
to hunt the enemy of their enemy;
the
Anglos delayed liberation;
sparing
train tracks, sparing useful killers.
We
risked and bartered our bodies for bread,
between
the hungry mouths
of
machine guns.
Our
skin crusted in the ovens,
with
no meat on our bones.
IV
Farmwives
who kept family purity
laws
were gang-raped
along
with Berlin debutantes.
Surgeons
were strung by their hands;
rabbis
beards were ripped away.
Selections
sawed up families;
children
swept like wood chips.
Sages
were stolen from their studies,
schoolboys
plucked from piano lessons.
V
We
were numbed past fear;
hope
became sarcasm.
They'd
half proven that
we're
not chosen,
a
genocide for a deicide.
After
this our courage was crushed,
our
vision darkly dimmed.
Who
could see an Israel
in
Britain's Palestine?
Yet
the sun could never set
On
the empire of our Lord.
VI
Why
did it take forever
to
remember us?
You
abandoned us too long
to
the free will of men.
Turn
history back to us, Lord,
and we'll turn it back to you