Subway
He saw her at the subway station
Standing on the platform waiting for the train.
Inside the car they sat in front of each other.
She was quite young.
Though not strikingly pretty
She was good looking and attractive
And he liked her back-combed black hair.
It was long and lustrous and gathered into a chignon
And softened with a purple satin ribbon
That matched her elegant blue dress.
She wore high heeled black shoes
And her ivory skin shone on her comely legs.
The train moved and stopped
And moved again
At the stations the doors opened and closed
And people streamed out and in.
She sat quietly in her seat
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poem by Paul Hartal
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Armenia, Armenia
After the great flood Noah’s ark landed
on Mount Ararat, says the Bible.
Nowadays, the snow-capped summit
of the mountain soars over Yerevan.
Although the dormant volcanic cone
of Ararat lies south of the border,
in Turkish Anatolia,
the view of the mountain dominates
the skyline of the Armenian capital.
Most of the territory
that was once part of historic Armenia
belongs to Turkey today.
Under the yoke of the Muslim Ottomans,
the aspirations of the Christian Armenians
to obtain autonomy clashed
with the dreams of their rulers
to establish a pan-Turkish Empire.
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poem by Paul Hartal
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Little-Known Death Factory
Operation Barbarossa,
The German invasion of the Soviet Union
commenced on June 22,1941.
Behind the rapidly advancing Wehrmacht forces
mobile SS death squads, the Einsatzgruppen,
went into action. They killed Jews,
Soviet prisoners of war and political commissars.
The historian Raul Hilberg estimated
the number of Jewish men, women and children
murdered by the Einsatzgruppen
in the ravines of Babi Yar, in the forests of Riga
and many other places at 1.3 million.
On the outspread yards of a former kolkhoz,
a dusty Soviet collective farm,
the SS task forces set up a secret death factory.
Its horrible assembly lines creaked and cried
in the outskirts of Minsk of Byelorussia,
near the village of Maly Trostenets.
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poem by Paul Hartal
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The Boy Who Came Down from the Cross
He stood beside his father before tumbling into a deep pit.
A split second later a volley of shots were fired.
His father fell with the others into the abyss, shot dead.
But sixteen year old Zvi Michalowski was alive.
It was a pitch dark night when he climbed out of the pit.
He was naked and his body covered with blood.
He heard the Lithuanian executioners singing, laughing,
Celebrating the shooting of the Jews.
They were all drunk by now.
As Hitler’s armies were advancing on Moscow
The murderers arrived with an Einsatzgruppen unit.
They entered Eishyshok, an old Jewish town in south Lithuania,
On September 25 of 1941. On the same day and the next
The paramilitary SS units massacred about 5,000 Jews
From Eishyshok and adjacent villages.
Zvi Michalowski knew the place like the palm of his hand.
He passed the Jewish cemetery beyond which Polish and
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poem by Paul Hartal
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Science is Unscientific
The Professor rose from his chair.
He moved the book to the middle
Of the table as he stood up.
"Now, listen! " he said in an amicable voice.
"Science prides itself in being factual,
objective, precise, unbiased, detached
and verifiable, free from introversion,
a way of knowing things without added colours
and portraying accurately the physical world
in its own light".
The Turtle was sipping his ginger ale.
"Oh, this description of science is nothing
but a myth", he said. "As I see it,
even the most magnificent accomplishments
of science involve emotions,
an individual sense of wonder and curiosity,
the psychological experience of the rapturous
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poem by Paul Hartal
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Painting For Hitler
Anyone who paints the meadow blue
And the sky green with yellow clouds
Should be sterilized or executed,
Adolf Hitler said.
For many years I waited with a response to that.
Finally on a spring morning I took a canvas and
With slow and measured brushstrokes I painted
The sky green with yellow clouds
And the meadow blue.
I did this not only as a symbolical act
Of defiance but also in reply to the present day
Followers of the Nazi dictator who continue
To admire and worship him.
Prior to his rise to power Adolf painted
Nostalgic landscapes. He also designed
The Nazi flag in which he reversed
The ancient Hindu and Buddhist icon
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poem by Paul Hartal
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Khmer Rouge Atrocities
Goddess Ganga’s Mother of Water,
the great Mekong River
flows through the Kingdom of Cambodia.
The former Kampuchea borders Thailand, Laos and Vietnam.
It was once a powerful Buddhist Khmer empire
that between the 11th and 14th century ruled
most of the Indochinese Peninsula.
On its red background, between two horizontal blue stripes,
the Khmer national flag displays a stylized image of Angkor,
the magnificent ancient temple complex,
a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The temple ruins are located amid forests and farms
at Tonle Sap, the Great Lake.
The people of Cambodia take stately pride in Angkor,
as a lofty symbol of Khmer nationhood and identity,
In the 20th century Cambodia underwent turbulent changes
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poem by Paul Hartal
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Big Bang with Horizon Problem
The crocodile rested idly on the Nile bank.
The Sun rose toward the zenith in the sky,
The hot air was trembling over unstirred grass
And an Egyptian plover landed near the river.
“Long time no see”, the crocodile said.
“Oh, I am very busy”, the wading bird answered.
“Is that so? ” the crocodile inquired.
“Oh yes”, the plover said, “I study astronomy.”
“Have you ever heard of the Horizon Problem? ” the plover asked.
“No, this is the first time that I hear that the horizon has a problem”.
“Well, we talk here about the horizon of the universe
And it is a scientific mystery. Mind you, the primeval atom
At the beginning of time exploded in the so called Big Bang
Nearly 14 billion years ago. Now, as you might know,
Nothing can travel faster than light. But when you look
Across the vast space of the visible cosmos, from one edge
To the other, you ought to consider that these two edges are
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Time's Arrow Arrested
Dusky shadows hide under the leafy boughs of the lanky trees.
Beyond the dark sky the sun carries the bright promise of
a lustrous morning. But it is merely a promise. For, the experience
of the past is not evidence of future events.
And how perturbing can be the obvious. This ever present and
precisely dissected substance that we break to exact hours,
minutes and seconds, and call it time. How mind-boggling is
this historian’s palette, Newton’s infinite attribute, Einstein’s finite
fourth dimension.
Astronomers say that a colossal firecracker called the Big Bang
exploded about fifteen billion years ago, marking the beginning
of time and the universe. Yet this sophisticated modern myth
does not really solve the enigma of time or the mystery of existence.
After all, why does the world exist, rather than not?
Newton viewed time as a mathematical duration, an absolute
temporal dimension in which time flows steadily without relation
to space, matter or human affairs. Many years later, Einstein
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poem by Paul Hartal
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An Oak Wood Piano on Kristallnacht
The SS guard hit Zindel Grynszpan on the head and he fell
Into a ditch. Father, he heard the voice of his son, you must
Go on. Zindel took the hand of his son and climbed out of
The trench. With his wife, a son and daughter on his side
They continued the march. But the SS guards did not stop
The savage whipping of the deportees. Blood was flowing
On all sides.
The Grynszpan family were Polish Jews from Hanover.
When the Nazis came to power they became outcasts.
In October 1938 they were expelled from Germany
And deported to Poland in a group of 12,000 Jews.
They were taken by train to the frontier town Neubenschen
And from there on foot to the German-Polish border.
When they reached the border heavy rain started to fall.
The Nazis confiscated their money. They had no food to eat.
Polish officers arrived and began to inspect their papers.
They admitted the refugees with Polish passports,
Housing them in military stables. Old, sick and children
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poem by Paul Hartal
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