Purge
The Aryan Jesus, in Hitler’s painting
Madonna and Child, is, I trust, a Jew,
however blond, beneath a firmament
whose children are not yet children,
but calm, sententious, and removed, steadfast
as the precious metal in their hair.
Doubtless our little savior is feeling
over-yellow, as the wheat must feel
given the liberal sentiment it’s under,
where peasantry of a German valley,
somewhere south of new Jerusalem,
busy themselves, harvesting the light.
They kneel in the style of Valkyrie
left to rummage through the battlefield,
to gather the bold who died like gods.
Aryan Jesus was created from light,
extruded from a tube of cadmium,
zinc, acidic salt, antigens that target
a brain, a heart, a testicle, a tongue,
vital systems gone unnoticed until,
exhumed, they make their failures known.
Aryan Jesus is, of course, immune,
and so lives on, baptized in the blood
laid down in gilded portraits such as these.
Let me begin again. A child is born,
and as the manger cripples in the wind,
as the cow and donkey wander off
toward a dip of land on the horizon,
the cradle waxes luminous, raised
an inch above the excrement and hay.
Even as names fade from the gravestones
that are painted figures, bent beneath
their weight in gold, the work ahead continues.
A brilliance fills the carriage where it sighs
into the mire and workers never sleep.
So tireless their labor, they hallucinate
angels, flags, wheat where there is only
emptiness now, emptiness and ether,
fire and all that providence consumes.
