Listen to the poem.
The Holocaust: A Poem of Remembrance,
by Tamara Beryl Latham

Skeletal frames,
whose beaten hearts
once bore,
the heft of Hitler’s war,

who knelt en masse,
in silence quaked
with stifled groans
beneath the veil of death.

Through reddened
tear-stained eyes
they prayed in vain,
for meager crumbs
of hardened
moldy bread.

While Kristallnacht fueled
raging fires
that burned old memories
and future dreams.

Death trains droned,
broken bones were stacked,
as clinking gold
removed from teeth
shattered the serenity of night.

Yet, through the horror
of sacrificial lambs,
an image loomed
within a vapor cloud:
Rachel weeping drops of blood,
‘My children are no more.’

And what remained
were piles of sable ash,
unmarked by granite stones,
that filled the earthen pits.

Yet, I still weep
for what was flesh
reduced to bone and cinder –

for those with silent tongues
who turned away.

If tears were oceans
mine have formed them all.