People of God

Another bullet hits my skin.

Now there's a separation,

Barricades over the grass,

all of us sleeping in the dust

with mirages overlying our desperate regrets.

Am I blue? Am I white? Am I crimson?

Am I on this side because of a better reason than,

"It's the law."?

My brain is full of poison

washed with a system of ideas and

freshly cleaned with racism bleached

in liberalism.

Now we

complain about the fumes.

Misunderstanding its importance and the danger

of our dooms.

Nonchalantly I look to you for help

and there's nothing I'd love more

than owning a pair of pajamas

with no stripes on it.

So I seek refuge in the demanding need I have of freedom

so I write

and I suffer

and I work all day like no other.

I'm just a worker now.

Not a doctor,

not a father,

just a Jew like no other.

I ask you next to me, sweating like the pigs

they call us,

"What do you hate the most?"

And you answer,

"Them,"

but even though I'm supposed to agree with you

I fail to

and since you don't ask me what I do hate, instead I say nothing.

It's been months since I've seen you.

They said you were taken to another house of torture

but I don't believe a word.

My sources may be limited

but I knew you better than to abandon without a goodbye.

It smelled worse than it did before you left.

The hatred you had must have stank more than fear.

I'm here now not sure how to react,

scooping the dust out of the bags of rust,

and am looking at the stars tonight

contemplating whether to do God's

unspeakable sin,

or stay and hate myself more than before.

A guard turned to me today, an hour before the Soviets

liberated us.

He asked me if I knew what had been going on here.

I pretended I didn't, because the more you know, or seem to know

there, the worse it is.

He urged me on, saying that I was the quietest yet smartest

man there, and I simply looked at him and said,

"People of God do not answer to People of Hell."

Writing this now may look like a cry for help,

it may also be a way for me to find solace,

but I am writing this in hopes that it will reach you,

despite my beliefs about your whereabouts that day you disappeared.

This isn't a letter of remorse or demand for reconnection.

This is a letter to simply give you the answer to the question you never asked.

It still haunts me.

Because I didn't mean it,

and perhaps that's why you're not here with me right now.

"I hate you most of all because you hate them."

I found you weak for hating them. Because hating them

meant we accepted that they were more powerful than us,

higher, smarter than us.

I hated you and people like you for showing such weakness

because you reminded me of how hopeless we were.

I am not reaching out to find out if you're out there.

I simply want to tell you that I don't hate you anymore.

I stopped hating you the moment I realized

what was happening in those chambers,

and where you ended up at the end.