Walking Subtitles


When orders came to liquidate the prisoners,
an altogether new awareness
settled on the guarded
and the guards.
What previously passed as mere brutality,
gave way to conversion:
humans into mannequins
whose slippery flesh paved the earth,
becoming landscape,
void of explanation.
There is a night which exists in daylight,
a prison not escaped
with open fields or busy plazas,
and voices never quelled by silence;
memory works that way.
The escaping few, did not;
and courageous soldiers who
risked life to spare souls in their charge,
still live in fear
of whom they were before the edict.
All who lived bespeak their torture quietly
by living, enduring, interpreting for us
what should not be forgotten.

Copyright (c) 2006 Gary Brown