I walk beside the prisoners to the road. <br />Load on puffed load, <br />Their corpses, stacked like sodden wood, <br />Lie barred or galled with blood <br /> <br />By the charred warehouse. No one comes to-day <br />In the old way <br />To knock the fillings from their teeth; <br />The dark, coned, common wreath <br /> <br />Is plaited for their grave - a kind of grief. <br />The living leaf <br />Clings to the planted profitable <br />Pine if it is able; <br />The boughs sigh, mile on green, calm, breathing mile, <br />From this dead file <br />The planners ruled for them. . One year <br />They sent a million here: <br /> <br /> <br />Here men were drunk like water, burnt like wood. <br />The fat of good <br />and evil, the breast's star of hope <br />were rendered into soap. <br /> <br />I paint the star I sawed from yellow pine - <br />And plant the sign <br />In soil that does not yet refuse <br />Its usual Jews <br />Their first asylum. But the white, dwarfed star - <br />This dead white star - <br />Hides nothing, pays for nothing; smoke <br />Fouls it, a yellow joke, <br /> <br />The needles of the wreath are chalked with ash, <br />A filmy trash <br />Litters the black woods with the death <br />of men; and one last breath <br /> <br />Curls from the monstrous chimney . . I laugh aloud <br />Again and again; <br />The star laughs from its rotting shroud <br />Of flesh. O star of men!<br /><br />Randall Jarrell<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-camp-in-the-prussian-forest/
