HOL-7_People_Fence

Bones of the Earth

Creative writing students at Harlow College have been writing poems and stories commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.-Birkenau. Here is a poem by first year diploma student Olivia Armes. Our photograph is of prisoners sitting by a wire fence eating their first meal after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Credit: IWM BU 4006

Stripped down to its bones
What was actually going on?
I listened to stories from survivors and families
And every time
They were stripped down to their bones.
The layers of: tight knitwear
Thick socks,
Padded jeans,
Ghosts haunting their eyes and bleaching,
Grown-out hair beyond shoulders,
And fading numbers inked…
Suffocated and repressed on the left side of
Their chests. Just above the organ that kept them alive.
The only thing that wasn’t
Stripped down to the bones, but guarded.

To have the heart of a community ripped out of its chest,
Bones and skeletons of buildings
Just about hold these places together
When everything else is torn apart.
The bones of this Earth could shift
And yet you’d band together to
Repair the devastation.
But our, their, or my bones could shift differently
To yours, and there will be someone out there
Who will want to burn my bones to the Earth.
Because it’s different.
By belief,
Spirituality,
Physicality,
Or sounds shaped to words
To mean something,
It’s when the person is stripped down to their bones that
Only then…

Well, only then they can see
We all bleed the same.


Olivia Armes

Share this post

Skip to content