Through childhood I thought it was God’s
imperceptibly caring hand: the close calls,
the car skidding to a stop before the crossing train,
the ladder tipping, then righting against the wall,
the snarling dog turning inches from the rambling child,
the tornado shearing a path through the wheat field
but knocking no barns or houses down,
I was reassured by Daniel in the lion’s den,
not a tooth mark, not a scratch,
or the three men in the furnace unscathed,
as if there was no fire.
I learned of the frenzied scrubbers in 1942 Wannsee,
set to purify the European corpus with corpses
according to their racial hygienic codes,
all the lethal sponges expunging innocence,
the bleach of Buchenwald,
the incinerators of Auschwitz,
the perverted good they dreamed
as they made the world a living hell.
Was Daniel used to bolster God’s supernatural reputation
and the three fire men used to further clinch the point?
Which begs the question: How were the victims of the Nazi
hellfire used for God’s purpose?
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Wannsee – a suburb of Berlin, Germany, the site of the infamous Wannsee Conference where the
decision was finalized to murder the Jewish population of Europe.