Joomla project supported by everest poker review.

The child dancing

there’s no way I’m going to write about
 
the child dancing in the Warsaw ghetto
 
in his body of rags
 
 
there were only two corpses
 
on the pavement that day
 
and the child I will not write about
 
had a face as pale and trusting
 
as the moon
 
 
(so did
 
the boy with a green belly full of dirt
 
lying by the roadside
 
in a novel of Kazantzakis
 
and the small girl T. E. Lawrence wrote about
 
whom they found after the Turkish massacre
 
with one shoulder chopped off, crying:
 
“don’t hurt me, Baba!”)
 
I don’t feel like slandering them with poetry.
 
 
the child who danced
 
in the Warsaw ghetto
 
to some music no one else could hear
 
had moon-eyes, no
 
green horror and no fear
 
but something worse
 
 
a simple desire to please
 
the people who stayed
 
to watch him shuffle back and forth,
 
his feet wrapped in the newspapers
 
of another ordinary day

 
 
Dance Poetry
A comprehensive anthology
Edited by Alkis Raftis
Copyright 2012

©