I received a very kind E-mail from John Guzlowski of the Lightning and Ashes blog. This blog has linked to John for awhile now.

John has three published editions of poetry: Lightning and Ashes, Third Winter of War: Buchenwald, and Language of Mules.

John’s poetry is primarily focused on his parents who had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany. His website notes the his poems try to remember them and their voices.

John was extremely generous and sent along a poem which he asked me to include on these pages. He said:

I want to give you a poem about my father and his beliefs. He was a “faith-filled” man, and always took Jesus and the things the priests said seriously.

This poem is particularly appropriate as we remember the faithfully departed this All Souls Day. I will certainly remember John’s parents Jan and Tekla in my prayers at Requiem Holy Mass tomorrow. Eternal rest grant onto them O Lord!

What My Father Believed

He didn’t know about the Rock of Ages
or bringing in the sheaves or Jacob’s ladder
or gathering at the beautiful river
that flows beneath the throne of God.
He’d never heard of the Baltimore Catechism
either, and didn’t know the purpose of life
was to love and honor and serve God.

He’d been to the village church as a boy
in Poland, and knew he was Catholic
because his mother and father were buried
in a cemetery under wooden crosses.
His sister Catherine was buried there too.

The day their mother died Catherine took
to the kitchen corner where the stove sat,
and cried. She wouldn’t eat or drink, just cried
until she died there, died of a broken heart.
She was three or four years old, he was five.

What he knew about the nature of God
and religion came from the sermons
the priests told at mass, and this got mixed up
with his own life. He knew living was hard,
and that even children are meant to suffer.
Sometimes, when he was drinking he’d ask,
—Didn’t God send his own son here to suffer?—

My father believed we are here to lift logs
that can’t be lifted, to hammer steel nails
so bent they crack when we hit them.
In the slave labor camps in Germany,
He’d seen men try the impossible and fail.

He believed life is hard, and we should
help each other. If you see someone
on a cross, his weight pulling him down
and breaking his muscles, you should try
to lift him, even if only for a minute,
even though you know lifting won’t save him.