pink triangle.

i.
strange that, as a child, i made sandcastles out of the ashes
of concentration camp victims.
my peers read of Boxcar Children,
I of the children who evolved into adults within seconds.
i bathed in the bloodbath of our nation, never knowing why.
strange that i could feel my bones go brittle, my entrails turn to glass
as my mother put her arms around me, shielding me from
their bodies being slaughtered.
our hearts were massacred that day as we watched the televised genocide.
strange that i could taste the chambered gas stilling life and innocence,
that i could smell not death, but living death.
i could feel. taste. smell. because if i had lived under the swastika,
i may have been the one carted away to a concentration camp because of
the pink triangle marking me, because of
the addition of one letter to the person next to me.
Mrs.

ii.
more than ten years later i tiptoe through the holocaust memorial museum and
i feel like moses.
strange that, a place like this, it feels like hallowed ground.
how? where was God in the 1940s?
i'm that little girl again and i feel like fiction and i'm too afraid that
the cost of becoming real means becoming victim.

iii.
for 3,000 years, until 1920, the swastika represented life and religious reverence.
today the debate continues on whether to disown
or to accept, very tenuously, the symbol.
i know how the swastika must feel.