Tag: Holocaust

Made of Stars

Welcome to Poetry Friday! This week we are hosted by Rose HERE at her blog, Imagine the Possibilities. Thank you for hosting, Rose. 

Take the blinders from your vision, 

take the padding from your ears, 

and confess you've heard me crying, 

and admit you've seen my tears.
       MAYA ANGELOU, Excerpt from her poem, "Equality."

After posting a villanelle last week I wrote a few more. I became familiar with the form, and found it useful to try again. But there were none that I liked enough to share this week. Que lastima!

I know I’m not the only Poetry Friday blogger who watched the Ken Burns documentary on America and the Holocaust. It’s well worth the time and I hope everyone sees it, especially kids old enough to understand. Watch it Here on PBS. I know more about America’s response to Nazi Germany.

First of all, Hitler used our Jim Crow South and the treatment of Native Americans as guidance on what to do about the Jews. Though the killing of thousands appeared in newspapers, readers thought it was a lie. And that was a convenient belief for the many just didn’t want to help Jews.

What comes to mind when we think about the Holocaust? Most Americans think of death in gas chambers. However, that was just one creative and efficient method used. There were endless methods used to murder thousands and thousands of Jewish men, women and little children. Guns, being thrown from heights, starvation, exhaustion, exposure. One writer said Nazi methods and depravity was “bottomless.”

Ken Burns shows us the details of how Nazi thinking evolved and the genocide was organized. Many Americans eventually, over several years, came to believe the murdering was really happening, but by 1944, it was too late for the four million had already been killed.

Because of the racism of members in Congress and the State Department, America didn’t help Jews for a long time, though, near the end, heroic individuals supported by our government stepped up to smuggle thousands of Jews out of Europe. Of course, we owe a debt to the soldiers who fought in the war.

I learned Charles Lindbergh, once an American hero to many, who in the 1940’s was eventually recognized as a Nazi sympathizer, created a slogan, “America First.”

Years later, in 2016, many probably might have thought that slogan was new, not a recycled, stale, failed boxcar to a dark chapter of our past.

I offer this poem today.

A HUMAN GALAXY

Our bodies, made of cells
are like 
constellations

like the one who wears 
a belt,
another dipping water,
and others
all conjured from stars.

While we, 
swirl together
sharing our humanity
in our smaller 
and fragile universe. 

© Janice Scully 2022

Our children need to understand about white supremacy, Hitler and how all groups that are labeled “others” are treated. If they don’t, a Holocaust could happen again.

I am so grateful for our democracy and the efforts made by our President and others to keep it.

Thank you for reading! I am looking forward to a good weekend and hope you will have one too.

Thank you, Rose, for hosting Poetry Friday!

What is Poetry Friday? Look Here.

About Sewing and a haiku

Thank you Laura Purdie Salas for hosting Poetry Friday this week. Stop by and read her music inspired verse.


I have always liked making things and my mother encouraged me to sew.

She left the Singer on the dining room table for me to use when I wanted. She’d be downstairs cooking in our family’s restaurant kitchen and I could always find her if I needed help. Her birthday was last month.

I don’t spend much time sewing now. But I am about to finish a small quilted wall hanging, the size of a extra large place mat, with wonky stripes inspired by the amazing quilting artist Maria Shell. It’s free form “modern quilting” with no rigid rules, like a free verse poem.

Without my mother’s encouragement I probably would have never learned to sew. I sometimes wonder if sewing has become a frivolous activity in the 21st century. But I know it isn’t.

The man who owned the fabric store where I grew up was a Holocaust survivor. His wife, an expert seamstress, used to help me pick out fabric. I’d look at bolts of fabric for hours and they were always patient and kind to me.

Thirty later I saw Mr. S again. He was elderly and his wife had recently passed away. It was touching to see him again. He told me that they hid together for many months, as teenagers, in a cave in the woods near Warsaw to escape the Nazis. With needle and thread Mrs. S sewed warm clothing with cloth that he stole during night time excursions to town. Her sewing helped keep them warm. My teachers or parents never taught me about the Holocaust, unfortunately, even as I had Jewish friends in school.

To end, I’ll share a haiku I wrote this morning inspired my the amaryllis blooming in my kitchen, four flowers blooming north, south, east and west.

Bold amaryllis,
a lighthouse casting four beacons!
Who keeps the lights on?