Windows, once transparent,
now splintered glass.
Night’s supple, fluid dark
hardened to stone.
The virus of hate was deliberately released.
A plague of permission broke out,
a moral cholera,
weakening a resistant ‘no’,
favoring an infectious ‘yes.’
As the disease progressed
allowance crippled restraint,
uncivil advantages were taken.
What was against the law became the law.
In the streets men spoke a language of snarls,
glass shattered,
hot venom spilled igniting books,
a centuries old craze now loose
sent scorched pages
flying,
fire-blackened crows,
into the sky.
Doubtless thugs,
infected with a virulent strain
of advantageous belief,
invited ill-starred men
abruptly to leave their homes
wearing nightshirts of incredulous shock.
Fury cooled until rage became reason,
plans were made,
factories built, the industrialization of murder,
corpses manufactured by the thousands,
commodities traded on the market of death.
Husbands and fathers,
children, mothers, wives,
disappeared
into the malicious maw
of hollow caustic
cataclysmic years.
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Tonight is the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass.”
My book of poems Titled “Hell Broke Loose: Poems on the Holocaust” is
coming out soon.