Where The Birds Fear To Fly

This particular piece was inspired by a documentary that I watched on the History Channel about the Holocaust. And there was a man hosting it, and during the course of the documentary, he took the viewers on a tour of the ruins of Auschwitz. And he noted the creeping sense of irony, that the camp is isolated within the most beautiful of forests. But once you walk past the barbed wire fences, and enter the forest, there is an eerie silence there. As if even nature knows of the horrors that went on there. And the line that he delivered, made the hair on my arm stand up. He said, "imagine being in a place where even birds are afraid to fly." And I was so moved after watching this documentary, I did my best to write. And this is the result.

"Where The Birds Fear To Fly"
2012

There's a land so far away
Where the grasses are still green
The sky's a brightened blue
It's such a blissful scene
And there's forest very near
That can inspire words
But if you listened close
Not a sound is ever heard
But look to the left,
And what do you see?
A barbed wire fence,
That's as tall as a tree
And the reason for this,
Is what you'd expect it to be
It's the birth place of death,
That supplied misery
And it's a natural contradiction
To find a place like this
A landscape held in wonder
It could be a place to miss
But when I'm glancing to the sky
Friend, I often wonder why
God clearly can't be found
In a place that birds still fear to fly
It was back in nineteen fourty-two
When their business saw a boom
But thanks to wretched history
Modern flowers fear to bloom
So now the forest has to sit
In complete silence as it grows
Around a God-forsaken place
That everybody surely knows
And if you looked to the left,
You know what you'd see
A barbed wire fence,
That's as tall as a tree
And the reason for this,
Is what you'd expect it to be
It's the birth place of death,
That supplied misery
And it's a natural contradiction
To find a place like this
A landscape held in wonder
It could be a place to miss
But when I'm glancing to the sky
Friend, I often wonder why
God clearly can't be found
In a place that birds still fear to fly
Built on a foundation of fear
While engineering the death
Here the wind barely blows
It comes whispered like breath
The walls are cold to the touch
And chills greet the spine
For once bigotry screamed
From the most corrupted of minds