Embers and Snowflakes Migrating

I descend from Prussian tradition full of frozen rain and fire’s marches Lagoons and marshes my father and history know about the Baltic Sea where amber swims ashore adorned jewelry of hearts and minds now on my lover’s slender neck We share ancestral stories my wife and I of concentration camps and necklaced innocents declared informers in Apartheid set alight with tyres in hateful petrol fumes and Jewish screams to Genesis in the beginning that was the word when ashes upon ashes held all Phoenix’s aground and violence and genocidal anger knows no boundaries In flaked photographs and winter ember days set aside for prayer to the Universe avalanches and winter glows are waiting for the solitude of summer’s dawning when Christmas is just another Sudan desert day abandoned by the God of hellfire Equidistance from Johannesburg and Koenigsberg belies the message flies away from Peace lie lies and old recurrent news in which winter landscapes rarely light the hollow eyed children’s dreams but glowing coal burns brightly when the sky erupts and hallowed bombs fall from heaven and I declare snowflakes and ember a luxury problem in my soul