The Postcard of Sophie Scholl
There is the lightning-white moment
when I learn—
the way my costive train to Krakow
stopped
and I woke to find myself,
in jostling twilight,
at the Auschwitz platform—
that the Italian postcard
I garnered in Milan years ago
as a genial talisman
isn’t of a pipe-dreaming
Italian boy,
no, no, but an androgynous
image of Sophie Scholl,
the young, intrepid resistance heroine—
as if I’d registered,
in my Schubert-adoring daughter,
my school-resisting son,
a fire undetected before:
Doric-strong nouns demanding
What would you undertake
to stop tyranny?—
stouthearted nouns:
integrity, probity, courage;
in benighted Munich,
the spit-in-the-eye swiftness,
the unbossed bloom
of a crossed-out swastika,
the fierce integrity
in the gust of the word freedom
sprayed over the walls
and ramparts of a deranged
fatherland that rent flesh
as if it were foolscap—
Someday you will be
where I am now,
a steely, premonitory Sophie
proclaimed to the rapacious
Nazi tribunal that rushed her
to execution—
Gazer, collector, in clarity’s name,
look close, then closer:
it’s not just a bud-sweet,
pensive beauty,
a bel ragazzo’s charm;
all these years:
it’s the spirit of crusading youth
that I’ve cherished.
Cyrus Cassells, "The Postcard of Sophie Scholl" from The Crossed-Out Swastika. Copyright © 2012 by Cyrus Cassells. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Source:
The Crossed-Out Swastika
(Copper Canyon Press, 2012)
