Kathe Kollwitz
The poor are lost
to everything but hope.
That’s what suffering is for--
to remind us of the faces inscribed
on our hearts.
That’s why I drew
directly on the stone.
The stone is more ancient
than all our hunger.
It holds the image
as if it were a God
and we were little tin figures
crowded into a peasant’s room
or weeping into
air of a perpetual yellow cast
over the cries of the child
oppressed by
. . . poverty
that “circumstance”
of means
that is created by wealth.
Needless to say,
the bourgeois did not interest me.
I preferred to
describe the figure
in a starkness
of line
and the crowded dark rooms
of our failed aspirations.
. . .When I was forbidden
by the Nazi’s to exhibit again,
I did not leave Germany
like so many others did.
It’s true there are poor everywhere,
but I stayed with my own,
In the plain little house
with its thick feather-bed
where I had trembled
so terribly after painting
my self-portrait,
the day they told me
my son was dead.
