[Orwn Acra]

Originally Posted by Roger Slater

Wilbur's "The Pardon" is the only poem of his that I think is powerfully emotional. It's a great poem, my favorite of his. Though the quieter emotion of poems like "Love Call Us to the Things of This World" is (for me) hard to deny. The soul descending to accept the waking body is original and works for me quite well. Hecht, on the other hand, I've never been able to bond with. Would Hecht fans please single out one or two starter poems that might hook me?

I think "It Out Herods-Herod. Pray You Avoid It" is the one most people turn to. What interests me is why this poem leaves me cold while, just to compare it to another highly learned mid-century formalist poem also written in response to the Holocaust, Auden's "The Shield of Achilles" does not, a poem I find so moving I can recite parts from memory. Perhaps just the whims of taste...

[Matt Q]

Originally Posted by Roger Slater

Would Hecht fans please single out one or two starter poems that might hook me?

Roger, I don't know Hecht that well, but I liked this one of his. It was on Cally's list, too. It's also one that doesn't seem to fit Orr's criticism of "grim scenes are delivered in filigreed writing" that Cameron and Walter have echoed.




Book of Yolek

Wir Haben ein Gesetz,
Und nach dem Gesetz soll er sterben.*

The dowsed coals fume and hiss after your meal
Of grilled brook trout, and you saunter off for a walk
Down the fern trail. It doesn't matter where to,
Just so you're weeks and worlds away from home,
And among midsummer hills have set up camp
In the deep bronze glories of declining day.

You remember, peacefully, an earlier day
In childhood, remember a quite specific meal:
A corn roast and bonfire in summer camp.
That summer you got lost on a Nature Walk;
More than you dared admit, you thought of home:
No one else knows where the mind wanders to.

The fifth of August, 1942.
It was the morning and very hot. It was the day
They came at dawn with rifles to The Home
For Jewish Children, cutting short the meal
Of bread and soup, lining them up to walk
In close formation off to a special camp.

How often you have thought about that camp,
As though in some strange way you were driven to,
And about the children, and how they were made to walk,
Yolek who had bad lungs, who wasn't a day
Over five years old, commanded to leave his meal
And shamble between armed guards to his long home.

We're approaching August again. It will drive home
The regulation torments of that camp
Yolek was sent to, his small, unfinished meal,
The electric fences, the numeral tattoo,
The quite extraordinary heat of the day
They all were forced to take that terrible walk.

Whether on a silent, solitary walk
Or among crowds, far off or safe at home,
You will remember, helplessly, that day,
And the smell of smoke, and the loudspeakers of the camp.
Wherever you are, Yolek will be there, too.
His unuttered name will interrupt your meal.

Prepare to receive him in your home some day.
Though they killed him in the camp they sent him to,
He will walk in as you're sitting down to a meal.


* We have a law, and according to the law he must die.