Two Poems

Kate Daniels

After Reading Reznikoff

When I think of those mothers giving up
their children at the gates of the camps
or choosing one over the other, or accompanying
their youngsters to the showers of gas,
when I think of that wrenching, that
wailing, the force of those feelings, the
terrible potency, the fear breaking
their bodies in sweat and hives,
the vomiting and shitting, the mindless
lunging for their infants and toddlers,
their sons and their daughters, when I think of
that universe of last images, the eyes, the
unspeakable eyes of mothers knowing, the backs
of the children waddling away, being led
away, being pulled away, recalcitrant curls,
fallen hems, toys dropped on the gravel paths,
the little waves, the dipped heads, the incessant
weeping, when I think of the bleeding wombs
of dying mothers, pleading mothers, the bellies
of mothers with unborn babies, the breasts bursting
with unsucked milk, when I think of the various
ways the weather must have been—the cold
crunch of snow, the flowery delight of early spring
—when I think of the camps and the deaths of the Jews,
the millions of Jews, I think of the mothers
and their bodies, their childbearing bodies, their bodies
following their children to death, I think of
the noise of trains, the terror of trains,
their engines cooling into inert steel,
their clatter and steam, the scenes enacted
in the railroad yard, and the trains
remind me to think of the men, at last I think
of all those men in their greatcoats and their boots,
no children inhabiting their rational bodies, the mystery
of it all, the bodies of the women so alive
with emotion, the bodies of the men so dead
to it all, I think not of God, desperately I try
to not think of God, my good, great God neither
woman nor man, circling above in heartbroken panic,
the beating of wings, the cacophonous
suffering, the pungent cloud rising
of dark, dark feeling that silenced even Him.

Inscrutable

The face seen
for the first time
screwed up and wetted with the juices of my body,
the hair swirled down
into flattened, greasy
curls, the mathematical perfection of the four
extremities, the primitive
muscles of the mouth and jaw
already shaped around sucking,
and just the goddamn mystery
of it all why there is
anything, anything at all
rather than nothing, emerging
from the bloody hole in my opened
body, why anything
like this face, this
body that slithers from mine,
this call to claim it
undimmed after eons, irresistible
and thrilling as sexual
longing, why God leaning over
the paradise He made, and
splitting Himself to become
the first creature,
why in love with the world
for the rest of eternity,
alone no longer, inviolate

Visit Kate Daniels as Image Artist of the Month for May '01

Issue #13 • Spring 1996