Revisiting History

Smothered by alienating humiliation
the nation whose defences fell as the army
of conquest marched forward to take
possession of its soul and its soil turned
inward, snarling with wretched misery
searching out the presence within its bosom
of a cringing minority accustomed to the
viral outbreaks of violent hatred whose
passions over a thousand years of custom
ebbed and flowed and once and again
retreated, dissipated temporarily in the
wreckage and looting of homes, the wan
bloodied faces of survivors wailing and
burying their dead. This time mere pogroms
would be magnified to an extent no malice
might have imagined possible, organized
and institutionalized, formalized and
normalized to an enduring pitch of a
final solution previous atrocities merely
hinted at. Enabling the resentful occupied
to turn their rage fully realized on those
cowering victims, escorting them with
little ceremony to mass annihilation. And
when  the world peered within, then
recoiled in horror at living skeletons
released from the fate that had taken so
many millions, the perpetrators
fashioned a mewling narrative of duty
later to evolve into the myth of having
themselves suffered far more enormously
than those they escorted to mass death.