Käthe Kollwitz carved the woodcut Tod mit Frau im Schoss (Woman in the Lap of Death) in 1921.
A LITHOGRAPH
A next door neighbor
kept a print copy
of the lithograph
of Käthe Kollwitz
“The Lovers”
or the later
“Death holds a girl
in her lap,”
our family
did not know
about drawings
or posters
through the dark days
of the thirties,
I once tried
to conceptualize
in a first piano piece
but realized
Käthe outlives
my scattered notes
with every form
of metrical curiosity
in a foreign body’s
song about a picture
now set in language
to cover in miniature
my musical fingers
that all visages,
on stages
at all ages
not forgetting
those who view
her poetic drawings
will remember
intertwined personal
or universal tyrannies
and do something
about it.