USA

leah@mcn.org

DENTAL GOLD AND SWISS CHOCOLATE
Precisely stacked are those gold ingots
stored for half a century in Swiss vaults.
Swiss bankers are meticulous,
known for their respect for
privacy, for cleanliness, for the
purity of their equal treatment of
the Jewish dead and the German hands,
still bloody from pulling gold-filled teeth
from mouths waiting for
the crematorium.
Those merciless hands poured
wedding rings and teeth,
watches and teeth, Jewish
bank books and teeth,
poured all into that cauldron to melt
together into ingots stacked high
in Swiss vaults where faint screams
still echo despite sound-proofed
walls, the silence broken, fifty years
and still they scream, the sounds
emanating from ghosts looming darkly
over the gold bars so neatly stacked and
itemized on clean white paper by the
Swiss bankers who ask, so politely,
for proof as their manicured hands
reach for chocolate bars stacked
on their polished desks.
Where are the death certificates? they ask
the children of those screaming mouths.
Where's the proof?  Again they ask as they
bite off the chocolate with their banker teeth.
And as they eat their chocolate,
they stain their teeth,
and display in their smiles
the rot oozing from within.

IN INDIA, GRANPA IS A GURU

His hair, blond and thick,
weathers well,
no tattle-tale gray
to shiver the spines
of ex-flower children,
forever young in a land
where age, a disease,
is hidden in corners
and death denied.

What--you're forty--impossible!

Each dawn sees an army
who jog and greet the sun with smiles
of quiet desperation.

Like the night it comes,
inexorable the years,
and all the tai-chi, the yoga,
the meditation,
will not save one dead cell.

Sounds from the East are pearls
cast before gymnasts
with arthritic bones
who know not what they hear. 

©  Copyright, 2000, Leah Leopold.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.