I just finished reading Carly Sachs’ the steam sequence, a book of poems put out by the Washington Writer’s Publishing House. At the heart of this book is the story of a woman sent to a Nazi camp, a Nazi soldier, and a dead child. The poems float on the page with the haunting presence of history on the verge of being lost, but lost only by those of us not there, for with the woman

 at
any
moment
the whistle
and
she will have to board (3).

That’s one of the reasons we need to remember--the train always waits at bay even though in our relative comfort we might forget it’s there. For someone, it waits. Sachs does a good job of personalizing the horror and of reminding us of our call to remember.

Comments

Popular Posts