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Blind Chihuahua
Scriptorium

More to religion
than pleasing
your imaginary friend

Does G-d love even you,

Herr Hitler?

Your war helped time my birth
so that I was too young for Vietnam and too old for Beirut.
A family of refugees from you
taught me your language.
And your ruined land drove a young girl's family to America
where I married her.
In fear of you my country made secret weapons,
which kept the next war cold long enough
to give me a job
making more of them.
So much I, a Jew-boy, have from you,
who shamed the Western World into letting
Israel
be reborn.
Once mother found steamy swastikas
wet-fingered on the bathroom mirror.

I just wanted to see how to make them,

but
there you were.
There you were
when a man in a black shirt
was picked up by the SS.
Shouting slogans,
he shoved his sisterbrothers into the van,
and in the confusion,
ran
from himself
forever.
We see ourselves disfigured, damaged by our sins,
black-shirted, in swastika-covered mirrors.
But God’s Love through Christ, some say in my church —
the church that helped your people butcher my people —
can redeem all people of all times and places.
Even you?

Even your victims,

even me.
Dude, you creep me out sometimes.

This is a meditation on the irony of being a Jewish Lutheran in the late 20th century, and a perhaps arrogant proclamation of Universalism. It is not to be taken as cheap grace for Nazis. They'll get where they need to go.