M. Benjamin Thorne

Tannenbaum

To mark the miraculous birth

we bring a live thing into our home

and water it with admiration,

provide a mantle of tinsel and light,

hang ornaments like sacred medals

from its boughs and adoringly sing

O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum,

how lovely are your branches;

all so that it can slowly die,

dried out into a browning husk

shedding needles like desiccated tears;

then dumped, with all the pomp

of broke-down cardboard,

onto the street, a lifeless bum.

Exhibit (Oświęcim, Poland)

The room crowded with puffer jackets

boots, young, angled faces illuminated

by secretive flashes of small screens

all flowing past the exhibits like clouds

the glass cases containing dull dioramas

of hate’s detritus, so mindlessly repetitive:

Shoes, glasses, suitcases

Hair

Towers of suitcases

Mountains of shoes

Cities of hair

A civilization

ripped from context

anodyne with academic text

A heap of spectacles

no-one wants to see

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A Pushcart Prize nominee, M. Benjamin Thorne is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at Wingate University. Possessed of a lifelong love of history and poetry, he is interested in exploring the synergy between the two. His poems appear or are forthcoming in San Antonio Review, Thimble Lit Mag, Last Syllable Lit, Salvation South, Pictura Jornal, and Heimat Review. He lives and sometimes sleeps in Charlotte, NC.