Not Responsible

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.