Extracted Poems
“never again”
bloodshed will teach a lesson
nobody will learn
*
the protocol
little need be said about the mourning
the keening of mothers
the grief of fathers
the silence of children
their names will wrap the branches of trees
not to stifle
but to be seen
*
they will be bound
i am ready today
to sacrifice
man woman child
do not hear them
hear only me
follow me
*
outsiders
the truth is that he destroyed them
reduced them to particles in his yard
chimneys commanded the skies
the thrum of death
the echoes of extermination
impossible to ignore
as his wife danced
and children played in ash
Karina Patfield is a writer, poet, and PhD researcher from Hastings, whose work centres around the preservation of silence, particularly in the archive. She is an advocate for the recording of personal stories, and runs community writing workshops in her local area.
Note from the poet: My poetry explores how blackout poetry can intersect with archives to tell the true stories of the Holocaust. The poems are created from antisemitic propaganda, Nazi documentation, and Nuremberg trials testimonies, as well as personal archives and information relating to my family members who died in concentration camps. My work seeks to mitigate the practice of fictionalising, aestheticising, and sensationalising the Holocaust, instead preserving the silences that exist within archives.
The source for her found poems can be seen here Protocols – 4 poems.
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American Child Actors will play Palestinian Children
In the silent movie of your bones
I see an aurora borealis of phosphorous
your spirit dancing into the firestorm’s ballet
a rising actress in life and deaths curtain fall of eyelids.
How do we identify such remains?
Your mouth noosed into the thermals?
Breathing in the dreadful eggs of dragons
your clavicle shall rest upon your lover’s feet.
Somewhere in a cinema far away from Hollywood
I imagine celluloid burning out abruptly.
This is your finest monologue,
you are elegant in burnout.
This poem will feature in Antony Owen‘s 11th collection ‘Rain Men’, a collaboration of poems with Neil Laurenson that explore autism and late diagnosis (to be published Summer 2026 by KFS Press). His war poetry features in UK school peace education resources by Quakers and CND.