Would draw me past the gate to take the road,

They’d taken late to turn the shale to shatter,

   And scorn the clay churned mute beneath their load;

They must have known that I’d as mutely follow;

   That, in their wake, my footfalls would be bent,

Up through the old-growth oaks, the gnarled and hollow,

   To scale the mountain’s final pitched ascent.

   Like heated swap of partisan politics,

The incense of their highborn subject matter,

   Have to do, up there, with all the outcast bricks?

Heaving the upchurned way they took before me

   I gained (and lost) by way of labored breath

The brick-lade summit where, to blunt inform me,

   They angry spoke to me, by turns, of death.

   To impress upon me death so ghastly spoken;

The furied treads would show me how they busted

   The huddled bricks and left them crushed, death-broken;

Yet rampaged not alone in their mass-killing:

   As lethal treads, in death, just as complicit,

Stood still their ground in league, as close as willing,

   To feed they angry all they would solicit.

   -Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle

   Can patter out their hasty orisons.

And who to beweep the bricks and mourn their passing?

   Who to bemoan their end condemnatory?

Who now to lament, begrieve their huddled massing

   In death, and suffer for their rending story?

   When first I’d pitched that loneness in my heart

Upon the mount neath old-growth oaken black bough,

   When from the mass I’d wished to dwell apart,

I chanced upon the bricks, stacked, silent-banded,

   All huddled close, and felt for them, as one

Who too has kept, amassed, his silence, stranded,

  Apart the world the world cared not to shun.

   What numbered thousand souls were there amassed?

Who to beweep their fate, less in their hearts care

   They, far from empathy, were so outcast?

These questions, more, like life-spent leaves had fallen

   Unanswered on my earth of questing ears

As they so late of oak and long earth-sprawlen

   Amassed upon the moldering sum of years.

   Wherein is massed a life of pent-up living,

Slowly decompose to yield that held suspended,

   Releasing it in timeless backward giving,

So too these leaves that dropped to lay and molder,

   In questioning, upon my questing earth

Were moved to break down as the years grew older,

   And yield, in answer, all their pent-up worth:

   The whole of their foredoomed cementic kind,

Were—Bang!—the bankrupt class to disencumber,

 “Sold German!”—all—to ease their bankrupt bind.

“Load up zeir outcast lot on eighteen-vheelers!”

   The diktat came, and with it (God!) the furor:

“Relocate zem—brook no bleeding-heart appealers

   —Scorn each empazetic gentle-class demurrer!”

   —Vhere zeir sun-bleached bones shall shape ze New World Order.

A race to build—so built, vill no accounting

   Show vone cementic trace!”

“Heil! Third Brick Warder!”

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,-

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

   The small, the old, the weak, downtrodden classes,

As if the mountain, of this less-than-worth caste:

   Spake: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,”

Were bound in fate, mute suffering, despairing,

   And crowded onto flatbeds running, smelling;

Like cattle, herded past all worldly caring

   —All lost!—their ghettoed lot beyond compelling.

   As much in genocidal words implied,

And as good as said “exterminate each brick zat

   Builds zis: a race vone German can’t abide!”

But a higher diktat from a higher power

   Reigned: the German from all power to build was rended.

Fate, with mercy, in the eleventh hour,

   Allied: the German race to build was ended.

   For they atop the leaves long fallen, rotten

Atop the mountain came, no blest salvation:

   The bricks, far from indifference, huddled forgotten.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall.

   Each seeming a more merciless deferment

Than the last, have been their hollow-casted tears

   No savior came to save them their internment?

Only some eyes that wondered, then were gone

   As swift the wildfires too none would condemn

For burning into their souls, then moving on,

   Having burnt their sole support from under them.

   The German’s dream (he too) gone down in flames,

The bricks no one compassion once defended,

   To satisfy his German scion’s aims,

Were sold out one last time in dissolution

   And a final grim solution brought in to 

Do what passing years, for all their persecution,

   And passioned wildfires cared too much to do.

   As half the machine, the half that stands its ground

And feeds (I cry to each trodden-down-ignorer—)

   The half that makes the ghastly clattering sound

Of death (—do you not hear? do you not see,

   Cemented together, bound—one apathied all, 

So cast, in stone—it could be you or me?)

   So shaking me to the core, I shrink to recall:

   Because I wasn’t a Jew; and when they came

For the Catholics I didn’t speak up, I cry—

   “I’ll speak up for the bricks—and for the shame!

I’ll lay me down in the path of the juggernaut

   And let it crush all apathy from me;

Be the head and heart and soul of a counterplot;

   The embodied empathy that sets them free!”

   “But I am only one in a world of ones!

How, alone, can one put a stop to the genocide;

   Save they a ‘What can I do?’ world shuns?

A world not wont to see how its castaways

   Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

In exile and in sorrow end their days.

  And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

   In silent sighed-to-sighed leaf politics

From every sound yet mute unsounding tree

  (They weep! in sympathy for the fallen bricks).

Why can’t we have the heart of falling oak leaves?

   Why can’t we have the pith of oak trees all?

 I can’t bear one more such that so aggrieves,

   Yet still more heavy sad leaf-questions fall: