The Burning of the Jews

Robert Ronnow
Communicating the Bird

The Burning of the Jews

It was a woodcut in our high school history text, Unit 4 Beginnings of the Modern World,
     that so disturbed,
from the Nuremburg Chronicles depicting the burning of the Jews, flat perspective,
faces of the victims among flames, in no particular agony, not especially Jewish,
during the Black Death 1/3 of Europe died 1347-1351 alone. Although
you die together you die alone.
Earlier that week, I attended our 6th grade’s performance of Fiddler on the Roof, thinking
Coltrane should have recorded Matchmaker as a bookend to My Favorite Things
but as the play darkened
with the town’s absorption into the diaspora, democracy
yet unthought of and rule of law a fig leaf for authority
Jasper, who played Zero Mostel, delivered his line well to the effect
you’re just doing your jobs while wrecking our lives.

Anyway, nothing like that is happening here, is it?
The gardener planting tomatoes, the gravedigger finding skulls,
there is so much life a little death won’t matter.
Jasper
was a beautiful ham,
big as Zero.
A friend posed
this question: must all states be melting pots like the United States?
Should the Swedes be expected to open their border to the Finns?
I said yes not because they should but since
it’s inevitable. Let labor flow like capital!
America was the last word of the play and brought a tear of pride to my eye.

Immigration, exasperating argument re the Other.
How many’s more than enough? 9 billion, a rational,
real number that exceeds or we’re convinced
is within the carrying capacity of the planet.
Climate change is the new Black Death.
I like the Amerindian body type and face mixed in with the European, African.
The irrepressible economy rolls out reams of logs, ores of elements, bags of ice, fields of rice.
Embargo. The moon stares, bare, full of interstellar space.
Better a cold shoulder than a visit from our military.
The crazy Nazis must have felt themselves extraordinarily compassionate toward the
     mother, earth, the goddess, history, or some such abstraction and, thus, acted on a
     fraction of all they did not know.
Faceless soldiers just doing their jobs guarding the border or,
on the other hand, collecting fagots for the burning of the Jews.