I Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day - Gerard Manley Hopkins
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
Work Makes You Free - the tragic and terrible sign hung over many concentration camps during WWII was first made in Dachau by a Polish blacksmith prisoner named Jan Liwacz. The darkness enthralled the evil within. Liwacz was freed eventually and settled back in Poland to resume his craft. He died in 1980.
Darkness.
I stop to watch a star shine in the boghole –
A star no longer, but a silver ribbon of light.
I look at it, and pass on.
Terezin was a Nazi concentration camp just outside of Prague used as a disseminating point for Jews sent to other camps in Germany and Poland. It was also used as a propaganda tool by the Nazis pretending to be a model “ghetto” where life for Jewish people was “normal”. The darkness still exists here.