Theophilus Kwek (b. 1994)

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Morning at Dachau

Written by Theophilus Kwek
Dated 30 Nov 2020

As the years go, we leave our younger selves behind, gain new ‘ears and eyes’. The self that edits the poem is never the self that wrote it, but gains – with the passing of time – new experiences and ideals; even our sense of the language is tuned by time, to be attentive to other sounds and resonances. The longer the time between the writing and editing of a poem, the more different one can expect the edited poem to be: the writer has become a new person, and so the poem must become a new work. 

Morning at Dachau 
The concentration camp at Dachau was the first built by the Nazis in 1933. Few original structures remain. 

Like reading a poem: we disembark, feel the bump 
at the end of the line. Pose for a picture, proceed – 
inside is plain, bare. The expanse begs us
not to look for anything. Buildings are new, save
two of the bunkers, a guard-tower; memorials 
have since been planted over parts too difficult to name. 
We are taken briefly through, along the fence 
to the killing-room, walked cursorily down the path
made, in the first year, by the convicts. Here,
mouths our guide, is roughly where they would have stayed.

But there is nothing. Only shade, and pebbles turned 
by winter wind. Time is given us, afterwards, 
to wander between the poplar lines, return, alone, 
into the sun’s spartan glare. At first we are unsure 
of what is meant for us to discover. The place is terse;
flowers others have brought seem out of place. 
Yet as we walk into the stillness of the chapel 
at the end of the trees, captive to the thought 
that what is left is always less, what enfolds us 
is the conclusion that little is saved of what lived first. 
Ours it is to discern, from that torture, a finished verse. 

First published in Circle Line (Math Paper Press, 2014). 

When I wrote ‘Morning at Dachau’, months shy of 18, poetry seemed to be everything. I had just published my first book (They Speak Only Our Mother Tongue, with Ethos Books), and hankered after the popularity and transcendence that (I thought) accompanied the writer’s life. More than that, I saw the writing of poetry to be an end in itself. With a privileged teenager’s unearned confidence, I genuinely believed that creativity could be the solution to the most difficult questions out there, not least the ones thrown up by the vicissitudes of being 17. So it was natural for me, at the time, to believe in the idea that poetry could heal anything, even a rupture represented by a space like Dachau. 

Field Trip
Dachau, 2011

Here too late. We veer down a path 
bricked by hand in the camp’s first year. 
Buildings gone now, it goes nowhere  
among the names, unspeakable
on our visitors’ map: “__________”, 
“______ ______”. Words rob the air
from our lungs (or is it the wind 
that, brutal in December, makes 
us freeze?) All twenty of us, children,
caught in the glare of what remains: 
two wood bunkers, a guard-tower 
where one not much older than us
would’ve stood, taken aim. Squeeze, 
release. Impossible now to tell 
where, in time, we would have stood
or if our hands, stiffened and blue, 
could’ve done their worst work here. 
Like gale across gravel the question
flies, flings itself at our ears and eyes. 

June, 2020. 

For this reason too, the first thought I had when re-working this poem was that the last lines had to go – they were no longer lines that I could say without cringing (and a good deal of regret). But I started re-working the poem from the top, borrowing some turns of phrase from the original but largely stripping out the structure of its long, wide-eyed lines. Conscious of it being a re-working of an earlier poem, I wanted the new poem to carry a sense of looking back at the past, deliberately unpicking the earlier poem’s naivete, and capturing in its place a sense of the unease that I still feel today, thinking about that field trip from nearly a decade ago, and the resonances of the site itself. 

Looking at both poems, ten years apart, I realise the younger me was afraid of asking the questions that I now find it necessary to pursue. I suppose this is also what they call growing up. 

 

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