Sunday, May 5, 2024

I Never Saw Another Butterfly


May 4 
Commemoration Day in the Netherlands

🦋

I  Never Saw Another Butterfly

The last, the very last,
So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow
Perhaps if the sun’s tears would sing 
against a white stone....
 
Such, such a yellow
Is carried lightly ’way up high.
It went away I’m sure 
because it wished 
to kiss the world good-bye.

For seven weeks I’ve lived in here
Penned up inside this ghetto.
But I have found what I love here.
The dandelions call to me
And the white chestnut branches in the court.

Only I never saw another butterfly. 
That butterfly was the last one.
Butterflies don’t live in here, in the ghetto. 

🦋

Written  by Pavel Friedman, June 4, 1942 
Born in Prague on Jan. 7, 1921.
Deported to the Terezin Concentration Camp on April 26, 1942. 
Died in Auschwitz on Sept. 29, 1944.