For a Fiftieth Anniversary

The King of Denmark wore a yellow star.
French Jews paid for their own with one textile
ration-point: not what Pétainists wore
— and the jew squats on the window sill . . .

One thought it blasphemy his girls learn Torah.
One was the great-uncle of Simone Weil.
One was deported and so was the other
— and the jew squats on the window sill . . .

Habit and ideology illumine
banal perceptions of the human world.
The next-door neighbor’s something less than human
— and the jew squats on the window sill ..

The Eastern intellectual elite,
the ACLU-carded liberal,
the ecologists and the effete
and the jew squats on the window sill .. .

— or Palestinian, Croat or Greek:
invest with otherness, isolate, kill
the Paki or the nigger or the spic
— and the jew squats on the window sill . . .