Thirteen years old and clumsy for girls,
taken to the end of Auschwitz to witness
history and genocide: a cold
Polish summer with all birch trees gone.



There is no room for the sky
or what we will term “beautiful”.
It is not claustrophobic,
but it is a prison of thought.



How to see this rectangle of stone,
with the space for a small doorway,
as the ruined foundations
of what was once a gas chamber.

These empty, mute mounds of shoes fixed
a dull, leathered brown in a glass cube.
The teeth are exhibited next door
but dentistry cannot give us the death toll.



There is no room for the sky.
The space is quiet.