ON THE 90TH BIRTHDAY OF ANNE FRANK

1

On the 90th birthday of Anne Frank

think of two things

you human being,

you who stand for all humanity,

you who are its conscience:

2

That she could be still alive,

a great-grandmother perhaps;

could have written herself

beyond those years that now

define her to the world:

We have only what the

butterfly did just after

leaving the cocoon.

We never got to see it

transform into a falcon

soaring in the air.

3

That each day

somewhere in the world

an endangered child is writing,

perhaps with a pencil,

perhaps with a mobile phone

or a computer, her

or his story, a childhood slain

before the body might be -

a child in fear, embracing hope,

doing what Anne Frank

and many, many other children

in conflict zones have done

before and after she wrote

that slice of her life

into the pale immortality

print, myth and fame

give to the innocent slain.

It's a cry if not to the silent

multitudes of us who

could act, but won't,

then to the future to come.

4

Dear human, you

who stand for all humanity

like all of us do,

please act!

Let the children still living

in fear under bombs

and encircled by barbed-wire

become the future themselves.

Act, for her peers still living

could gain what she never

was given by this fallen humanity:

Decades of life, adulthood,

old age, to be a 90-year-old lady

looking back at those

long gone years of fear

when death hang over

every heartbeat.

Every moment that

becomes the past we

lose one of her peers

in some refugee camp

or bombed house

across the face of this

tormented planet. If

you feel sadness for her,

if you shed a tear for Anne Frank,

then shed more, for

every minute a light

goes out from a child's eyes

because we now,

like then,

didn't act until it was too late.

12.06.-13.06.2019