2024 NaPM 03 April

[RiverNotch]

Rules: Write a poem for national poetry month on the topic or form described. Each poem should appear as a separate reply to this thread. The goal is to, at the end of the month have written 30 poems for National Poetry Month.

Write a poem about a specific historical event which you have to specify somewhere in your post.

BONUS: Making things rather gnarly, the event has to be some kind of genocide.

[TranquillityBase]

Deathcamp Haiku

Inmate: why
are you doing this?
Guard: Here there is
no why.

Actual conversation between a camp inmate and a guard; sorry I can't cite the source.  Hits harder in German:

Warum tust du das?
Hier ist nicht warum.

[dukealien]

Brother Jonathan


What a lot of history
suffuses your old sunken hulk!
Fifteen years and half a world
from Newark birth,
fast steamer not so much
into harm’s way
as bearing it with you:
Panama, Nicragua,
then the famous runs–
San Francisco, Portland to Victoria
a name change, then changed back
(bad luck, as old salts know)
and finally your wreck
drowning hundreds within sight
of land, weighed down
by golden millions meant
to pay off Northwest tribes
not unlike those
which three years earlier
one of your passengers infected
with the smallpox
much to colonials’ advantage
in British Columbia
when half the natives died of it.

If a ship is not a living thing
with moods and fortunes,
times of virtue and of vice,
you could not prove it by
Brother Jonathan.

Paid my income taxes this afternoon to get in the mood for this one.

[Mark A Becker]

The Evolution of Evil

Maundy Thursday, it’s claimed
included 13 people in the Upper Room
for the Last Supper. But ever since
that 13th was identified
as Judas,the Betrayer, and since
He died on Good Friday, if Friday
fell on the 13th, it meant bad luck.

Ever since Eve, women have been
blamed for every manner of ills,
so it didn’t take long for evil suspicions
to rise: there are 12 lunar cycles per year
while women have 13 menstrual cycles.
Except, of course, for the Virgin Mary.

Shape shifting stories
became twisted through the years
with Crusades and Inquisitions
until so many of us no longer knew
what to believe. Who to believe?
I somehow lost my way back.
Is it just the wind?
This faint whisper of, "I am."

[RiverNotch]

Damaskinos Tanka (a readymade)


To the German leader wanting to deport
the Jews of Greece to Czechia,
Poland, and beyond:

According to the traditions
of the Greek Orthodox Church,
our prelates are hanged,
not shot.
Please respect our traditions!

Soon enough, the presses under him
were busy printing baptismal certificates
for those who would not receive
the sacrament,
keeping to their covenant
as he kept well his own.

[Tiger the Lion]

Tsar Bomba

Go ahead fat man,
play catch in the yard
with your little boy,

but it's no longer little league, sir
and our kid's 
got a rocket of an arm.

[Wjames]

Six-Day War

Just before the dahlias bloomed
around the smoke and sun and skin
of Haight-Ashbury,
Egypt exploded electric acid
in the iris, and the region
was blinded.

[busker]

Genocide

The Jews could never do
genocide,
like good Germans before them.
Irish gentlemen
would sympathise
with the plight of the negro.
Molto allegro
Italians would take the side
of the Eritrean settler.
A modern Hitler
couldn’t materialise
with our political correctness,
lack of directness,
social media uncovers the lies.

The Irish Fenian
though he killed Mountbatten,
with his liturgy in Latin
and vespers and matins
is forgiven crimes. The Palestinian
must do his time,
though smooth as satin
his character be.

Even sarcasm now faileth me.
Is no state ultimately
the final solution?
Away with the pollution,
of Deuteronomy,
Joshua, dreamt up by twits.
Nobody writes
of the Amelekites’
ancient Auschwitz,
destroyed dharma.
What goes around comes around
in the law of Karma.