I've Moved!

Hello wayward traveler - I thank you for visiting my blog.

I have recently moved to Wordpress, so I'll be slowly phasing my 'Blogger' blog out. If you've enjoyed my work and would like to keep seeing it, please go to simonaustinpoetry.wordpress.com and you can continue following me and my poetry.

I look forward to seeing you there :)

Simon.

I've Moved!

Hello wayward traveler - I thank you for visiting my blog.

I have recently moved to Wordpress, so I'll be slowly phasing my 'Blogger' blog out. If you've enjoyed my work and would like to keep seeing it, please go to simonaustinpoetry.wordpress.com and you can continue following me and my poetry.

I look forward to seeing you there :)

Simon.

Wednesday 5 October 2011

Covered Tracks

The orchard trees left petals of blood on the ground,
The sound of wood and metal shaking hands
In cold winds, rattled through souls
Lost within the smother of snow
Unknown destinations map out in clouds of misery
The mystery of tracks leading forward
Toward the end of the lines entwined within the depths
Of human annihilation.
Aspirations eradicated beyond pointless skies
As eyes look out through splintered cracks
In frozen oak.
Smoke on the horizon entices as tracks continue on
Through places well trodden, sodden
With the tears and the blood of ludicrous life.
The well written strife of those whose story was never told
Are old and meaningless, clotted within the soil of one-point-one
Lost under a sun of glowing atoms; forgotten and rotten
In the obituaries of history and time.

But the tracks remain prodded
As the trains of the damned roll on across white waves
Where the slaves are absurd and they scream out the words
Of books that are burning and pushing their ash to the sky.
The lies of the men spread like fire and fill the desire
Of a nation that is blinded by death.
Understand though that some have been left by the tracks
Were the monsters forgot to look back and select
The delectable pain and to punish the same
And they wish they were lost in the boiling
Combusting of those that will burn;
That are fit for the pit, for the urn
And there still behind oak as the smoke rises up to an eternal sky
Those that die, they have done so in vain.
And as the slain turn to dust in the ravenous furnace
Where the ultimate end to the life of the man
Is decided, not by those who cannot
But simply, by those, who can.

Copyright © 2011 by Simon Austin 


This poem is based and inspired by the trains that took victims of the Holocaust to the
'Gates of Hell' at Auschwitz-Birkenau,
1942-1945

The Nazis established their largest and most infamous extermination camp at Oswiecim, near Krakow, in Poland and called it Auschwitz.

Between 1940 and 1945 they killed more than a million people there - the vast majority of them Jews but also Poles, Roma (Gypsies) and Russian prisoners of war.

Trains filled with victims from throughout occupied Europe arrived at the camp almost every day between 1942 and the summer of 1944.