Bees build around red liver, <br />Ants build around black bone. <br />It has begun: the tearing, the trampling on silks, <br />It has begun: the breaking of glass, wood, copper, nickel, silver, foam <br />Of gypsum, iron sheets, violin strings, trumpets, leaves, balls, crystals. <br />Poof! Phosphorescent fire from yellow walls <br />Engulfs animal and human hair. <br /> <br /> <br />Bees build around the honeycomb of lungs, <br />Ants build around white bone. <br />Torn is paper, rubber, linen, leather, flax, <br />Fiber, fabrics, cellulose, snakeskin, wire. <br />The roof and the wall collapse in flame and heat seizes the foundations. <br />Now there is only the earth, sandy, trodden down, <br />With one leafless tree. <br /> <br /> <br />Slowly, boring a tunnel, a guardian mole makes his way, <br />With a small red lamp fastened to his forehead. <br />He touches buried bodies, counts them, pushes on, <br />He distinguishes human ashes by their luminous vapor, <br />The ashes of each man by a different part of the spectrum. <br />Bees build around a red trace. <br />Ants build around the place left by my body. <br /> <br /> <br />I am afraid, so afraid of the guardian mole. <br />He has swollen eyelids, like a Patriarch <br />Who has sat much in the light of candles <br />Reading the great book of the species. <br /> <br /> <br />What will I tell him, I, a Jew of the New Testament, <br />Waiting two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus? <br />My broken body will deliver me to his sight <br />And he will count me among the helpers of death: <br />The uncircumcised.<br /><br />Czeslaw Milosz<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-poor-christian-looks-at-the-ghetto/
