Today – the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz & Birkenau, the infamous Nazi death camps. It is Holocaust Memorial Day: and we should never forget. Words are inadequate but they are all I have. This is my Lament for the Jews, Gypsies, cast-outs, unwanted, despised… all the victims of what happens when evil thoughts are let loose.

Tears unheeded
shed on concrete floors
wiped away by skeletal kids
Lungs choked
by noxious hatred
with genocidal solutions

Lest we forget
Holocaustal reminders
should make us cry
so our generations
never repeat killing
by decree of expediency

Camps of Death
liberated by shocked soldiers
to save the few
Too late for millions
we must never forget
Auschwitz and Birkenau

Never again
for God’s sake
and ours

And theirs, hid in a river of tears.

(c) Richard Starling, Holocaust Memorial Day, 27th Jan 2020