Kenneth Salzmann

One Day in Oswiecim*

I.
It hasn’t changed. The serene
green countryside reaches
toward a cloudless sky, and this
land could be your land.

II.
The oldest woman in town
trembles a bit remembering
an unsettling glow lighting
her childhood, but this
town could be your town.

III.
There’s a playground now
on the peaceful street
where ghosts were born
and legends linger, and this
street could be your street.

IV.
The women in farmhouses
and tidy village homes kept
the curtains drawn so the
children wouldn’t see, but this
home could be your home.

V.
The world comes in buses now.
Tourists stagger through history,
pausing to catch their breath,
inhaling reassurance that this
history will not be their history.

VI.
It hasn’t changed. The serene
green countryside reaches
toward a cloudless sky, and this
land may be your land.

*A small city in Poland, better known by its German name, Auschwitz.


Another Gray Afternoon in Guernica

Not even the startling red of anguish
pooling in the streets of the ancient
market town, and not even the raw green
silent screams of the women, and not the cerulean
certainty of April skies capping the afternoon
can ever pierce the gray reality.

Gray is the color of death dropping
from the sky in early spring, and the last
color left on the artist’s palette after the bombs
have drained the world of warmer hues.

I can’t remember how many
gray afternoons I spent in the
very heart of Guernica on a bench
in the museum on 53rd Street,
not daring to breathe while wondering
when the red would begin to flow
from those wounds and wondering
when it would finally stop.


Green Card

It turns out you might be
part of a mass migration (or
an invasion, depending on
the perspective of the speaker)
without even knowing that
your own imperative to go
grows out of the same need
that drives a million more
to pack up what little fits
and set out for a border.

You might find yourself
wondering what beyond
the trickling Rio Bravo del Norte
separates the inhospitable
scrub on one side of the border
from its mirror image on the other,
if not foolish vanity.

You might make your way
tentatively across desert
and desolation, into a new world
where custom and language
hold you forever almost-home.

And in the end you might
sigh in deep relief on the day
you walk out of inmigración
clutching your long-awaited
tarjeta de verde, like a million other
displaced gringos finding refuge
in México.

Acknowledgments
“Another Gray Afternoon in Guernica” and "Green Card" originally appeared in Monthly Review. “One Day in Oswiecim” was first published by the International Human Rights Art Festival.


About the Author

Kenneth Salzmann, formerly of Woodstock, is a writer and poet who now lives in Ajijic, Mexico. From 2012 to 2016, he was a poetry judge for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. His poetry has appeared in Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers, Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude, The Heart of All That Is, Rattle, The New Verse News, Home Planet News, The Comstock Review, Chronogram, and elsewhere. He can be contacted at kensalzmann@gmail.com.

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