started her work for abandoned children,
replied, "On the day I discovered I had
a Hitler inside me."
After the trains had been stopped in their tracks
and the barbed wire flattened by Allied tanks,
after they tallied the rumor of horror
with shoes and bones, she left Poland
disguised as a peasant, gave up
her relationship with Goering and began
dreaming of the Pope, humming Gregorian
chants while she walked all the way to India,
her heart an enigma not even she understood.
In Calcutta she smiled
to see such squalor, for though Hitler was dead,
his designs were perennial.
As she lifted the fleshy faggots
of rags from the street and carried them
to her makeshift hospital, a perverse mathematics
filled her head with calculations
for an army of uniformed sisters
whose habit demanded nothing less
than conquering the miserable world.