Poetry Super Highway

26th Annual Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) Poetry Issue

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Mary Anne Abdo

The following work is Copyright © 2024, and owned by Mary Anne Abdo and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

Markings

Human branding.
Like cattle in a pen.
Shocked to see photos of human beings,
bulldozed into a skeleton dirt pit.
Images from an eighth grade,
library book.
Being accused by older classmates,
it was my faulted German decent,
that my family and I killed Jewish people.
Tears streaming down my red face,
uncontrollably crying all the way home,
after school to my mother.
Asking why humanity is so,
so cruel.
Crying and praying for the Jewish people.
Wondering how many of my newspaper route,
customers lost,
family members,
friends,
and neighbors.
Wondering if they were tortured,
or marked with numbers.
Reading The Dairy of Anne Frank,
my fourteen year-old self,
and Anne loved our families.
We loved to write.
And we were trying to understand,
our adolescents.
I was safe.
Anne was not.
That was forty-six years ago,
and I still cannot fathom hate,
that is steeped in a person’s entire being.
Remembering those cherished,
lessons on the eastside of Scranton.
Contemplating the gorgeous lives lost.
Because of human being’s ethnic birth and faith.

This was a very emotional poem to write, and it needed to be written.

We must never forget the lives lost because of hate. We must never forget that every life is so precious.