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DEATH’S
HEAD
At
least I was lucky. I
managed
to
mourn you, mother.
In
spite of the corpses frozen
on
the lower bunks of the Gulag trains.
I
stood at your feet crying,
your
frail death’s head
shrunken,
historical,
stone
or wax to my kiss.
From
these bones I came.
And
I felt so guilty towards you.
Not
everyone is so lucky
with
tears to exorcise guilt,
to
have the dust signal in silence
that
he is forgiven, he must go.
How
many were deprived by those trains
under
the soap clouds of corpse-smoke
hung
round the earth as it veered
into
this century?
With
all those bodies heaped like a ghastly mistake
how
many millions in the undone cities
were
able to put their lips
to
an identified head?
Alan
Marshfield
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