A Camp In The Prussian Forest

I walk beside the prisoners to the road.

Load on puffed load,

Their corpses, stacked like sodden wood,

Lie barred or galled with blood

By the charred warehouse. No one comes to-day

In the old way

To knock the fillings from their teeth;

The dark, coned, common wreath

Is plaited for their grave - a kind of grief.

The living leaf

Clings to the planted profitable

Pine if it is able;

The boughs sigh, mile on green, calm, breathing mile,

From this dead file

The planners ruled for them. . One year

They sent a million here:

Here men were drunk like water, burnt like wood.

The fat of good

and evil, the breast's star of hope

were rendered into soap.

I paint the star I sawed from yellow pine -

And plant the sign

In soil that does not yet refuse

Its usual Jews

Their first asylum. But the white, dwarfed star -

This dead white star -

Hides nothing, pays for nothing; smoke

Fouls it, a yellow joke,

The needles of the wreath are chalked with ash,

A filmy trash

Litters the black woods with the death

of men; and one last breath

Curls from the monstrous chimney . . I laugh aloud

Again and again;

The star laughs from its rotting shroud

Of flesh. O star of men!