ALOHA PROMISES FOREVER

The Death Head of Night
by Michael Doyle

There in the darkest of the 20th Century
Were pages to learn from in our history
Such evil as was darker than the night
Where our traditions still bring us light

No matter what the king tells us
Truth will prevail as it is and ever was
Despite our moments of dire captivity
If we who seek it, seek with receptivity

We who worship under the rule of law
Must always do our best to recall
Bearing the world's wisdom in transmission
The Guide For the Perplexed in times of transition

Yiddish had its literature of sacred ritual
That offers mystic union with the godly spiritual
While monsters arise from the ghosts of misery
So it has always been throughout Jewish history

Adolph's struggle was a thing of vast ugliness
Filled with organized robbery and thugliness
While the world stood by doing almost nothing
The Jewish people needed the miracle of something

In this atmosphere, Weisel studied and learned
As all around him the world raged and burned
Questions then are the best form of communication
With the God of the endangered Jewish nation

Within the kabbalah's pages lies mysticism
To be grappled over with hope and optimism
The soul rises to join in God's eternal
While all around on Earth and below blaze as infernal

The spark of us joins in this sense of unity
For all who seek their way through all eternity
Until evil comes to take us apart one by one
Until at least the worse deeds are seen or done

Graves are dug in barren fields by the dying
As the diggers persist while mothers cry sighing
Babies are targets and the rest are for extermination
Survival is only had through severe determination

The prophets speak despite the falsity of accusation
As the unhearing silently betray the Jewish nation
Is it hope or the saddest bits of desperation 
As the Death Head occupies itself with extermination

Evil slipped then from its uber-under shadow
Herding the Jews into their caged ghetto
And so then it is written in scarlet history
Never to be forgotten, these moments of cruelty

Hanging desperately to a life having lost taste
When each day slips by with dreaded haste
The flavor is lost from the sordid wine
When a people are kept behind separation's line

The Elders stay determined that all will work out
The younger know only the ways of fear and doubt
Driven out by the Death Head's Order of deportation
Shipped off in cattle cars to an unknown destination

All of the collected treasures now meaning nothing
When death's craven coming calling without bluffing
Wanting to believe things will turn out alright
Clinging yet further to a hope no matter however slight

While made a sport of the rogues' thuggish game
Where Germany's best look gleefully without shame
As Jews fight over even the driest cup of water
And fathers would cry out for their sons and daughters

Sitting huddled shrieking at unseen flames
The terror of knowing the coming end to all names
Of those once loved and held onto tight
As the Death Head was coming with darkening night

Ghost train rolls on until the ending track
Auschwitz was a place for no coming back
Formed into lines, Mengele practiced his cruelty
As a master conductor leading the devil's symphony

With a thoughtless flick to live or to die
The grief felt demanded the necessary lie
Living skeletons pressed forward in pulse of hunger
For the sake of madmen now lived under

Marginalized by those proven to be demonized
Until all the surviving were naught but dehumanized
All for the sake of going on barely living
Hopeful that the end would somehow prove forgiving

The ability to believe and pray was all but lost
Such was the devastating, horrifying and total cost
While the Germans stuck to their grim determination
That every Jew would taste their own extermination

One last forced march led by the Death's Head
Suffocating by night in an overcrowded shed
Further and further into a demon driven West
As snow fell down mercilessly as if another test

Until only faith in Hitler's evil was left
As all goodness and hope was crushed into a cleft
Buchenwald became the next cause of incessant killing
And death became the mercy, if only God be willing

On April Tenth, the first Americans arrived
Finally to liberate the few who had survived
From the mirrored, sunken eyes was face he did not know
Never to be forgotten nor relegated to any shadow

From all of this suffering, all peoples must learn
That peace alone will bring goodness or we all burn
The Jewish people must never face this atrocity again
Of all the ancient peoples only the Jewish have had no end

This then is not a thing of happenstance or accident
In this is a purpose by God's hand quite provident
Let this be a lesson unto all of the very world
Whenever and wherever hatred is unfurled

(c) November 3, 2020  Michael Doyle
All Rights Reserved