The Exercise
One day in the lager
I saw a young and arrogant SS officer.
I was then a prisoner near Vienna,
In Strasshof an der Nordbahn,
Strasshof on the Northern Railway
In Southern Austria.
This haughty Schutstaffel (SS) man
Was dressed in a spiffy black uniform.
Under the eagled swastika symbol,
The insigne of the cross-boned skull,
Emblazed on his visor cap,
Stared menacingly at the world.
He wore his hat at a rakish angle
And in his right hand
He brandished a stick.
Like a conductor of an orchestra
He wielded the baton,
Entertaining himself jollily,
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poem by Paul Hartal
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Fate Hanged on a Hairbreadth
It was summer,1944.
The train stood at the railway station of Gyŏr,
halfway on the road
between Budapest and Vienna.
In the boxcars
there were over 3,000 passengers.
The Hungarian gendarmes squeezed
the deported men, women and children
like sardines into the wagons
and the prisoners were crying for help.
For the SS-Unterscharführer
assigned to the transport
it was just another job.
The corporal already directed
many similar trains to the east.
And those trains always went to the east
and to the same terminus.
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poem by Paul Hartal
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The Illusion of Gravity
Gravity is an illusion, says the Scientific American
in its issue of November 2005.
Well, then how come that I cannot fly like a bird?
Oh no, smiles Professor Juan Maldacena.
Gravity, he explains, is one of the dimensions of space,
and it might be a holographic phenomenon
caused by the interactions of quantum particles
and fields in a lower-dimensional domain.
It sounds good, professor, but are we closer now to
the understanding of reality than we were last October?
As you know, Newton thought that gravitation
was the attractive force between masses of matter
but Einstein concluded that it resulted from
the warping of space and time by objects that follow
the geometrical curvature of the cosmos.
Now let us change a bit the topic and talk about
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poem by Paul Hartal
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Travel in a Box Car of the Fuehrer
Armed with bayonet-fixed rifles
And hurling vulgar insults
Royal Hungarian gendarmes
In cock- feather- plumed hats
Shoved us with vicious force
Onto a shabby cattle car
In the railway station of Szeged.
And then they locked the doors.
With my little sister in her arms
Mother and I found ourselves
Amid eighty men, women and children
Squeezed together like sardines
In a hermetically sealed tin can.
The wagon was ill-ventilated
Its small windows were barred and wired.
The Jewish prisoner train
Departed slowly with the deported
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poem by Paul Hartal
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When is a Painting Finished?
I paint.
On my easel
pictures in oil and acrylic grow
like stalagmites in limestone caves.
I think that painting is a magical act
that transforms invisible thoughts
and feelings into visible colors
and forms.
But I never can tell
when is the work finished.
After all it is always possible
to change a line, a hue, or a color
or even the whole composition.
Painters have different opinions
about this.
Some say that when the artist
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Pesticide Fields
For Rachel Carson,1907-1968
In La Belle Dame sans Merci
John Keats writes about the sedge
That withered from the lake
And the birds that stopped to sing.
But unlike the poet’s merciless Dame
You, Rachel, you were a Lady
Of great compassion.
The eels and the scombrids still swim
Under the Sea Wind somehow
Yet your Silent Spring evokes
A verdant season without bird song
On the pesticide fields.
Half a century ago you warned
That the abuse of DDT
And other chemicals harm
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The River of Permanence
It is not possible to step
Into the same river twice,
Said Heraclitus of Ephesus.
Since other and yet other waters
Keep flowing on,
The river is never the same.
And like the river,
Everything in the world
Is in constant change and flux.
Nonsense! Retorted Parmenides
Of Elea. Nothing is in flux.
Things never change, he said,
The world is permanent.
Objects of thought and speech
Must exist all the time.
They cannot change
Because change consists in
Things coming into being,
Or ceasing to exist;
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The Messiah in Strasshof
Inside the grinding burden of the crusty past
dreary facts hide, jubilant verities hibernate,
haunting memories trumpet and overwhelm the poet
he is compelled to tell what cannot be told.
But this is a true story and it must be told.
It happened long ago, as the ordeals of 1944
curled into the agonies of 1945
over the tormented body of war-weary Europe.
Exhaling anguished stench soaked in torrents of blood
mighty armies clashed in apocalyptic combats,
against the forces of darkness.
In the unrelenting wintry cold
the fighting intensified along frontless fronts.
There were daily air raids and dog fights in the skies.
Humming allied bombers flew towards their targets
and the German flak firing from the ground
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The Phantom of Time
Many years ago
I imagined time flowing
Like a river without banks.
Then I read some books
Of science and they said
That time is an irreversible arrow,
A relentless, unhaltable train,
That moves irresistibly, like fate.
It travels from Past to Future
On invisible wheels
Neglecting to stop
At the railway station
On the road, called Present.
But I was not absolutely sure
That this was all true.
So I watched the clocks
And I saw their hands moving,
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Batman Combats Oscar Wilde
“Are you serious? ” Frederick asked.
“Yes, Oscar Wilde, the writer”, George Batman said. “We had a conversation in the park.”
“Oh”, said Frederick. “Is he not dead? ”
“We had a conversation in the park”, Batman said.
“I see”, said Frederick.
“You remember that in The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde argues that books cannot be moral or immoral, only well-written or badly written”, Batman commented.
“So? ”
“Well, I disagreed.”
“And why is that? ” Frederick inquired.
“Look. Wilde confuses content with style. A book with a moral message can either fail or excel in its stylistic presentation, and so can a book with immoral content.”
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