The King’s Lynn Poetry Festival was held during the weekend of 30 September – 2 October this year. Two years overdue because of Covid, Jean Boase-Beier and I read poems from our book Poetry of the Holocaust. An Anthology (Arc Publications 2019). Whether it was because of the break in the line of annual events or because this is always the case, the atmosphere at the festival was magical. Our Saturday afternoon event was for a full house at the splendid Town Hall on the Saturday Market Place (yes, the day of the week is in the name of the square!).
On hearing poems of the Holocaust—written in many different original languages by people who experienced the threat and the persecution both before and during the Second World War, and by people reflecting on the horror afterwards—audiences are always very moved. The people present at King’s Lynn seemed even more captivated than at other readings we had done, devastated even, by the content of the poems. Several of them came to me afterwards, embracing me with tears in their eyes.
Here are a just few lines from André Sarcq’s long poem that I read, called ‘To the Twice-Murdered Men (The Rag)’, which is about the persecution of gay men by the Nazis in the concentration camp Schirmeck in Alsace-Moselle:
Yes we are here
mass of outcasts from the memory of the just
alien snow beneath the snow of the Jews
black snow
black snow blackened by the ashes
of shame
snow stained with the shot of offence
(p. 124; translated from the French by M. de Vooght and J. Boase-Beier)
and the last three lines of Ed. Hoornik’s poem ‘Pogrom’, written on 12 November 1938, two days after Kristallnacht, where the speaker is walking the streets of Amsterdam and thinks of the devastation spreading across Europe:
Jodenbree Street is a deep ravine.
Between the walls a brief scream sounds.
- It’s only ten hours by rail to Berlin.
(p. 32; translated from the Dutch by M. de Vooght)
It was an honour to be invited to the festival in King’s Lynn and be able to read these heart-breaking poems ‘live’ again.
On lighter note, the King’s Lynn Poetry Festival has a nice quirky tradition. It starts with an empty little A6 notebook that is given to every poet and translator at the end of their performance. The idea is that everybody writes a poem in it of their own making or choosing. At the end of the afternoon on the last day of the festival, which is always a Sunday, a raffle draw determines who gets to take home this treasure of a book. I hope I was participating in the raffle by proxy, as I couldn’t stay until Sunday, but I didn’t win the book and have no idea who did. I’ll probably never know what everybody wrote – except what I wrote myself! I jotted down my poem ‘Migratory – Going Home with Bruegel’ because I was pleased that it had appeared in Issue 7 of The Alchemy Spoon, filled with poems around the theme of ‘Space’. Here it is again:
Migratory – Going Home with Bruegel
I always forget
that Bruegel’s hunters
walk in snow.
And that they must be cold.
The hunters walk, heads heavy,
towards the town below.
They’ve caught one hare
and are bringing it home.
Home, where people skate
on Lowlands lakes
bordered by Alpine heights.
Bruegel’s landscape
is of two places, remembered
and imagined.
I walk to the end of my non-native
street, the edge of a wood.
Trees slope to the bank of a river.
I stand still for a moment
and savour the vista
I see through
the network of branches,
with cows and meadows
low down, across the water.
Budding leaves veil the view.
As I observe the
familiar landscape
the skaters return. They begin
to glide in the distance.
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