After the Flower Festival floats blossomed everywhere
we followed the tiny map to this garden cottage site
after that garden cottage site all through Haarlem
Holland we look to find the green places provided
specifically for women since the map says that men
would never take care of such spaces like the elderly,
and disabled left behind women who live out their life
ends in flowers in those green gardens where we discover
at the last one a small court yard of glowing blossoms
and trellised arbor the memorial with all the hundreds
of names of the people who the Nazis took away to kill
during the occupation of 1940-45 and I look for the date
in date book (I don’t know why) and it turns out to be
Holocaust Day I see as the bells in the Grote Kerk ring
out 5 o’clock     Bong!     Bong!     Bong!     Bong!     Bong!

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.