For miles before they reached the place,
they could smell it; a hideous stench
that none remembered from before
when they burned towns or hamlets;
by now they knew the smell of Death.
Young soldiers retched; others jeered,
then swallowed the last dregs of vodka.
At dawn they trudged towards
the line of ever-spreading smoke.
The wintry sun wore the veil
that belched endlessly so that now
there was no horizon; just a hellish pall,
even the fences were wrapped in it,
the barbed wire impossible to cross.
The creatures appeared from huts
like corpses animated by morning;
they shuffled towards the fence,
grinning weirdly, their bones ready
to split their faces, their shaven heads
as if the skin were about to vanish,
leaving moving skulls in tattered rags.
The soldiers stopped; only a young one went on.
They stretched their bony hands to his
but he cried out remembering the day
his mother returned from the gulag.
He was six years old.
The memory that plagued him, now made real;
he fell to the ground.
From: Other Routes.
(This poem won the Trócaire/Poetry Ireland Competition 2014. Judge: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill)
