As if you descended in each night’s sleep
Into your father’s grave
You seemed afraid to look, or to remember next morning
What you had seen. When you did remember
Your dreams were of a sea clogged with corpses,
Death-camp atrocities, mass amputations.
Your sleep was a bloody shrine, it seemed.
And the sacred relic of it
Your father’s gangrenous, cut-off leg.
No wonder you feared sleep.
No wonder you woke, saying: ‘No dreams.’
What was the liturgy
Of that nightly service, that cult
Where you were the priestess?
Were those poems your salvaged fragments of it?
Your day-waking was a harrowed safety
You tried to cling to – not knowing
What had frightened you
Or where your poetry followed you from
With its blood-sticky feet. Each night
I hypnotized calm into you,
Courage, understanding and calm.
Did it help? Each night you descended again
Into the temple-crypt,
That private, primal cave
Under the public dome of father-worship.
All night you lolled unconscious
Over the crevasse
That spoke only conclusions.
Hackings-off of real limbs,
Smoke of the hospital incinerator,
Carnival beggars on stumps,
The gas-chamber and the oven
Of the camera’s war – all this
Was the anatomy of your God of Sleep,
His blue eyes – the sleepless electrodes
In your temples
Preparing his Feast of Atonement.