Mundanity of Evil

by Kathryn Jordan

It was a holocaust play based on photos.
We saw the photos on the huge backdrop.
Bureaucrats, lawyers, doctors, secretaries.
We saw them laughing, eating blueberries,
barbed wire haunting the nearby distance.
There were pictures of the innocents, too.
People waiting patiently to be loaded up
onto boxcars, waiting in line to be killed.
When the play ends, I walk away quickly.
I see you’re not with me and I step away
from the crowd to wait. Standing apart,
I watch history’s sad faces shuffle past,
as if each patron had brought one dead
soul along: young boys in star jackets,
women with babes in arms, long-beard
rabbis, little girls staring at the camera.
I need to escape the theatre, forget how
the SS men who ran the camp had once
been shopkeepers, candy-makers, bank
tellers. You finally get to where I am
and we’re both irked. You want me
to wait and I want you to keep up.

Kathryn Jordan is the winner of the San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference Prize for Poetry. Her work has won honors in multiple years in the Steve Kowit, Muriel Craft Bailey, Connecticut Poetry, Sidney Lanier, and Patricia Dobler poetry contests. Her work can be found in The Sun, New Ohio Review and Catamaran Literary Reader, among others. She loves to hike the trails, listening for birdsong to transcribe to poems.