Vienna

Aoife Mannix

The rows of concrete books,
unreadable atrocities, the erasing of faces,
even the animals had to be sewn back together.
Gods smashed to pieces, the desecration of graveyards
or just the simple lack of flowers.
No ghosts to tend these ghetto memories.
The unpeeling of generations. Wiesenthal saved by the bell.
Other slaughtered prayers.

In the rumbling of coffeehouses,
the vast silences of so much savagery.
Bosnian war crimes, the hatred of gypsies.
The man in the market still saying he is from Yugoslavia.
To come from a place that no longer exists,
to step into a future with Nazi credentials.
Call it immigration, call it economics,
call it a blossoming between gravestones,
the courage to come back.

Such heavy set grandeur,
Freud and his impossible dreams,
Wittgenstein giving up philosophy
to take a lover forty years younger.
Under this solid politeness, the frankly met gazes,
the professor asking about African spears,
Rastafarian kidnappings,
refusing to believe in a black classical composer.

And all around the snow capped peaks
of unspeakable beauty.
So much whiteness a sugar coating on a darkness
that still breaths through sixty thousand Jewish whispers.

Aoife Mannix