Nov 22 - YGTV Poetry Corner: “The White Rose” By Rebecca Faller
Every Tuesday, YGTV will share the work of local poets. We’ll post poems submitted to us in order to help writers get more exposure, feedback and criticism. If you write poems, please send them to us for consideration and include a profile pic: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
This week’s piece is by Rebecca Faller. Rebecca’s poem won the top prize in last week’s annual Poetry Competition. The poem transports us to the horrors experienced by the German people in the 20th Century. (Pic by Stefano Blanca Sciacaluga)
The White Rose
Munich gave birth to many things;
The thirties and the forties, such splendid years for either side.
Oh the control and the fear. Oh the control and the fear.
‘And what did you do?’ they all asked at the end,
So their ghosts from the prison graves cried:
We are Der Einzelganger, the outsiders the troublemakers
We are children who entered the mouth of the wolf.
The Russian Steppes and Stalingrad, a naked limitless landscape
A call to all Germans, well those who saw their brothers die;
Cannon fodder in the snow, it turned them.
The last youth of their nation bleed to death
All for the hubris of untermensch.
She read Thomas Mann under the bed covers
They were making perfect German girls in summer camps
She was the perfect German girl,
But they didn’t know that yet.
My name is Sophie Scholl! Don’t you forget it! She wanted to scream.
And the troublesome youths rose,
The White Rose will not leave you in peace;
Graffiti on the hallowed Feldherrnhalle,
The suitcase full of notes slipped from her hands,
Truth fluttered down through the atrium
Geschwister Scholl, their time was up.
We will not leave you in silence or peace
Die rather than sin and apostatise
“Allen Gewalten sum Trotz sich erhalten”
Goethe, scrawled in pencil on his damp cell wall:
Despite the powers closing in, you must stand tall.
A mere three days and they were gone
No point of a judge, no point of a jury
The executioner is the only one needed here
And as the blade dropped down Hans cried
“Es lebe die Freiheit!”
The ominous slow beat of a drum,
The mournful second movement of Beethoven’s Fifth
They died so that Germany may live.
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