by Brett Rutherford
Atop a
mountain hunting lodge,
amid boar-heads
and many-antlered deer,
in a sunny eagle-eyrie
with barrels of wine and beer,
the best of the best have assembled.
As always, the
group of nondescript
officials lean in
upon a pile of folders and documents.
Each has composed a part
of the whole, without divining what
the leader really had in mind —
Him, the one
at the table’s head.
The unapproachable one
whose decisions are always right
without or without their labors!
At the great
man’s right, one says,
to open the topic at hand:
They are not like us, you see.
They are primitive. The one
on the great man’s left intones:
No manner of education can fix them.
One by one,
they chime on in.
Who knows that gods they really worship?
Their women breed like rabbits.
Times past, in these very forests,
we hunted Gypsies for sport —
so why not these ones?
Has even one of them composed
a symphony or written a novel —
not without fraud, I assure you!
The world
will be glad
when we are rid of them.
One near the
head of the table
opens his binder and indicates
the page to which they all must turn.
We can do
this, he says,
The Americans have shown us the way.
Their Indians are almost gone,
and will soon be exterminated.
They get
down to strategies
and tactics. A fund
has already been allotted.
Troops here. And here.
The border sealed.
Boxcars and trucks
are at the ready.
At the table’s
far end
the moustache rises,
then falls — a smile!
2
Sometimes
the room
is in a palace,
sometimes a sunny eyrie
atop a mountain hunting lodge,
sometimes a high-tech bunker
a-blink with lights and monitors.
Always, the
same kind of men
hunch over their binders.
They have lists.
As went the Indians,
Armenians, and Jews,
Romana and homosexuals,
now go the rest of them.
They do not
look one another
eye-to-eye. For each has a list,
and the other is on it.
Note: This poem was suggested by the Wahnsee Conference. On January 20, 1942, Nazi Party and German government officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, where the details were unveiled for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” I have moved the location to a hunting lodge.
