Not Responsible

Caroline Finkelstein

The floodlights come on: look,
a Jewish girl without a permit for her bicycle
stands caught in Prague; it's 1938,
for the love of God!
Can't you do something?

Wait a minute. You're crazy;
that was fifty years ago; you weren't born;
turn the floodlights off,
go back to sleep, dream geese
carried under the arm of an old woman

walking in new shoes in 1938; she walks
in lavish twilight
toward a black mountain of shoes.