Dead Animals

"Dachau SS Killings"
The site looked normal, typical.
Another slaughter to look into
in the age of slaughters,
the epoch of bullet and bayonet,
World War Two. Death's heyday.
I clicked on the link.

I watched the old film flicker and explode
into a menagerie of black and white and gray
and saw a man, clad in a single colored uniform,
standing with a .45 pistol, silver gleaming in the sunlight,
by his side.

He was American.

At his front was a line of men against a wall,
a jigsaw puzzle of grays against a single tone of black,
all uniforms camouflaged. They shivered, coughed, bled.

They were German.

One was on his knees, hands tied behind his back,
eyes puffed and dark from beating.
He spat at the American standing, with his
one-color uniform
and
one-color gun.

The American, emotionless, grabbed the German's wild hair,
squeezed it upwards with a bloodied fist,
and shoved the one-color gun
into the German's
jigsawed mouth.

"Fuck you," the captive managed in muffled German.

The American pulled the trigger.

A cacophony of fire erupted behind him.
One by one, the prisoners on the wall dropped,
sliding down the black wall
of their own making
on a shiny gray substance
of their own making.

An angry one-colored man appeared suddenly,
wielding an angry one-colored machine gun.

"What the hell are you doing?"
He cried.

The fire stopped. Two prisoners remained standing.
One shook and cried out. The other did nothing.

The one-color American with his one-color pistol
lit up a cigarette.

"What's the big fuss, sir?"

He flicked the match onto the jigsaw puzzle face
laying dead and disfigured in the mud and smiled.

"They're just dead animals."

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http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/DachauLiberation/SoldiersK...