Walter Holland
Dybbuks
Once I wore a white lab jacket and complained about caseloads
and the old aged, tottering and frail with canes or wheelchairs.
They would enter anxious for my examination, my treatment,
my young , impatient hands. Sometimes they seemed
like children to me, reduced to babbling, or whispering softly
their reminiscences: a 1920’s Europe they saw on a childhood
vacation; a brother or father killed in a World War. And then
there were those with numbers tattooed to their skin,
who shared their stories of detention and panic, of the terrible
efficiency of men and boxcars and smokestacks and the dark,
cold, lethal look of Dr. Mengele’s eyes, who by a mere grin or
simple gesture decided if one would survive; his harsh, clinical,
split-second decision based on nothing more than a perverse
science based on body mass, age, birth status or fitness to perform
hard labor. Choosing those suitable for his experiments, his studies
of human endurance, the effects of altitude, drug dosage, poisons
and the purposeful infliction of massive wounds. What’s happened
to them? Men and women who raised children with names like
Rebecca and Aaron, who founded Altman’s and Bloomingdale’s,
and pledged their allegiance to their newly adopted democratic country.
Walter Holland, Ph.D., is the author of three books of poetry including A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992 (Magic City Press, 1992), Transatlantic (Painted Leaf Press, 2001), and Circuit (Chelsea Station Editions, 2010) as well as a novel, The March (Masquerade Books, 1996 and Chelsea Station Editions 2011). He collaborated on the book and lyrics for a musical based on Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, which was staged at the 2017 Florida Festival of New Musicals. Some of his poetry credits include: Antioch Review, Barrow Street, Poets for Life: 76 Poets Respond to AIDS, Rhino, Hazmat, The Cimarron Review, and About Place Journal. He lives in New York City. He writes reviews for Pleiades and Lambdaliterary.org. Follow him at: walterhollandwriter.com
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