Poetry: All forms & styles||Charlie Brice|"Nuremberg"

Charlie Brice

Nuremberg

After the painting by Anselm Kieffer

The rows are straight. The Germans
are precise if nothing else.

The corn is gone, harvested,
warm inside the bellies of das Volk.

Dark and ugly furrows await winter, and what
a winter: Four years long, six million Jews long—

what happens when people deem one man
their savior, their thinker, relinquish

the unpleasant task of thinking for themselves. The
leader brands an entire people as the problem, as inhuman.

He becomes a tyrant of terror, a master of murder,
of extermination. Nothing is saved except the detritus

of idolatry, the ravaged fields of history, its factories
of destruction, smokestacks of shame.

About the writer:
Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest. His chapbook, All the Songs Sung (Angel Flight Press), and his fourth poetry collection, The Broad Grin of Eternity (WordTech Editions) arrived in 2021. His poetry has been nominated for the Best of Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize.

Image: The Nuremberg Trial 1946 by Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970). Oil on canvas. 1828 x 1524 mm. 1946. Public domain.

The Kieffer image: Rights to the Kieffer painting, the subject of this ekphrastic work, were unavailable at the time of publication. To view the Kieffer image, click on the link After the painting by Anselm Kieffer.