Kerry Hardie

Census, Moldova 04

He said the woman sat across from them and asked them questions.
He said it was official: they’d invited in E.U. observers.
He said she wrote their answers on the form in pencil.
He said they offered her a pen but she refused it.
The E.U. people have pronounced the whole procedure flawless.
The E.U. people didn’t seem to notice pencils.

The Inheritors

For Michelle Miles, Michelle Cummins and Eoin Brennan, Coláiste Mhuire, Kilkenny

She took me to the Martin Luther King place.
We spent a long time looking for the car park.
It was November, bright and blue and crisp.
We spent a long time looking for the entrance.
Then at the desk they wouldn’t take our money –
Everything in here, they said, is free.
We put away our dollars, but the shame
At being caught out buying our way in, would not refold,
And like a crumpled handkerchief kept springing back
Into a blossom – soiled, alert, determined.
We went to see the house where he had lived
We even saw the room where he was born.
There was a bed but not the bed. The furniture
Had long since blown away. Only the fragile stuff –
Lace curtains, glasses, tableware – survived.)
We grouped around the doorways, peering in.
It was all clean and warm and modest; middle-class.
Black middle-class. Something about it made it clear
slave was a word my head had understood
but not my flesh: its fetid stench.

In the museum we walked round the stands,
Inspected photos, reconstructions, watched the T.V. loops
Of Martin Luther King, his speeches.
This is not new to me, I said. I was a child, but I remember
some of this. You are much younger. What is it like for you?
They were all dead, she said, the Men of Light.
Ghandi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King. I was born
with all the Men of Light already dead.

Months later, and I have a class in their mid-teens
who do not know about the Holocaust.
Michelle, I say, you are a European Jew.
One day they tell you you must not walk there.
Nor there. Nor there. They make you wear a yellow star.
Now leave your flat. Your university place
must go to someone else. Your brother’s shop
has all its windows smashed. Your mother comes home
mud-splashed, shaking. In the park
she sat upon a bench where Jews like you are not allowed to sit.
That’s the beginning. There are trains.
They cram you into cattle trucks. No food, no light, no water.
When you get to where you’re going you’re sorted out.
You’re stripped, your head is shaved, you’re starved,
gassed, dumped in pits or shovelled into ovens.
Not just Jews. The same if you are
dissident, disabled, homosexual, a Traveller.
Owen, you are German, a nice lad, a railway worker.
You notice that the trains all come back empty.
You think of speaking but you do not speak.
You fear the cattle trucks that always come back empty.
You fear them for yourself. For father, mother, sister, brother.
You do not speak. They look at me, their faces still and blank.
I am undone. I’m giving them a darkness that is thick with horror.
No Men of Light, no women either. How will they live,
If we can give them nothing but possessions?