My imagination, high on post-war peace and smothered in sickly sweet safety cannot contort itself into the shape of the word ‘Holocaust’.

Under the Sun

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When I was asked to write a poem for a Holocaust Memorial event at my university I felt incredibly unqualified. I had only recently begun to write sociopolitical poetry and had no knowledge of the Holocaust beyond what I had learnt in school. To tell the truth, I have always avoided Holocaust-related materials because I have not been brave enough to try to grasp the magnitude of those horrors. I have also felt somewhat detached from it, in a way that I don’t feel for other tragedies like the Transatlantic Slave Trade. This poem is as much a wake-up call for me as I hope it will be for other people who have not yet engaged with Holocaust history.

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I often wonder what the sun must make of us
What moral judgements it pronounces against our collective self-harm.
Does it burn in contempt of the cruelty it has seen
Or are its fires a reflection of our own black desires?

I often wish I was as old and as everywhere as the sun
With a gaze like a shard of light, sharp enough to pierce hard hearts
and release the echo of lives swallowed up in hate.
Maybe then I could comprehend the stories I've heard, of horrors unwitnessed, 
that I am responsible for remembering.

But I am not like the sun.
My imagination, high on post-war peace and smothered in sickly sweet safety 
cannot contort itself into the shape of the word 
'Holocaust'.
Movies move me for a moment, I am constrained by reconstructions for a time but all these leave me
much too whole, much too home, much too un-displaced.

Yet, I am one with this broken humanity as we all are
We do not share in the sun's isolation.
When fragments of the past fall down to us on the lips of those whose memories 
know more shades of black, more shades of red than their imaginations
We must not shy away from the intensity of that colour.
When they are gone, we must carry their words on our tongues, their hearts on our sleeves, their tears on our cheeks.

The responsibility of remembering is too heavy to bear alone
It would slow your heart, take your breath away, quench all hope.
It is a good thing, then, that that burden lies on the shoulders of those with and without memories.
It is a good thing, then, that that burden lies on the shoulders of everyone under the sun.

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