Sand was running from their mouths,
but we thought it was Salt,
and our food would taste better.
Soon the earth was covered with dunes
of Sand and Sacrifice- Still life
of military genius Set free;
the children of the few who Sat
by the rivers of Babylon and wept for their city,
the even fewer infants Spared
from Herod’s Sword
only to grow up witnessing the burning
of the Sacred Scrolls at Alexandria -
the earliest Holocaust of knowledge –
and thousands of Hansels-and-Gretels in Europe
never to be rescued from the Ogre’s furnaces
are now potash
on the Shores of the Dead Sea.

(We all know this, said a preschooler,
tell us who killed the sea.)



©Elena Malec, California, August 2nd, 1997