In the cool retrospectives of our museums
We recapitulate,
Tabulating statistics.
Compared to the Black Death,
Dresden, all said and done,
Was an ocean's raindrop.
Hiroshima has no holocaust to outcompete
With Genghis Khan.
Even so,
In the inventories of our statistics,
The souls are too numerous to be lamented
One by one.
We cannot say kaddish
For each and every.
In the streets of Dresden, the German survivors
Collected wedding rings in buckets.
The wedding bands,
Engraved with the identities of the married,
Would help identify those many of the dead
Who no longer had faces.
I have a pocket calculator and can, at need,
Compute and recompute the actual numbers.
But what they really mean I cannot say.
Beyond my child's misfortune,
My mother's death,
I have no gauge at all
For human suffering.
The sundry catastrophes
Are as mute to me as the dictionary,
Saying no more to me of human tears
Than words at random chosen from the page:
Pinecone, wombat, blancmange.
This is the limit of my eloquence on death,
The death of millions.
This limitation
Is not cultural.
I share it with my entire species.
In the haystacks of our holocausts
The individual needle goes unsung.
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