"The Bard's Breath" is a Winds of Change.NET feature bringing you art, quotes and verse related to our times. We all need a bit more than just news to make it through these times: Spirit. Perspective. Faith. Humour. Reminders of humanity, and horror, and the shape of true victory.

With the ebbing of the war in Iraq, this feature will scale back to an irregular schedule. Expect it to run approximately once per week.

Sixty years ago the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto, already close to death from starvation and disease and with only a few hundred poorly-armed fighters among them, took on the German Army in a fight to the death. The 55,000+ casualties on the Jewish side meant near-annihilation, but the Germans had paid for their victory. Indeed,the 27 days it took them to conquer the ghetto was longer than it had taken the Wehrmacht to occupy entire European countries. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the first instance in occupied Europe of a mass uprising by an urban population, and is still remembered in poems, historical accounts (incl. German reports), even a museum. Not to mention the current hit film The Pianist.

In memory of that uprising, today's poem comes via the Jerusalem Post (Hat Tip: reader M. Simon). As the poet Haim Gouri wrote in memoriam:

"From this fire, which enveloped your tortured and burnt bodies
We ignited a torch for our souls,
In which we lit the blaze of freedom,
And with which we marched into battle for our land.

We have avenged your bitter and lonely deaths
With our fist, heavy and warm;
To the burnt ghetto we built here a monument,
A monument of life - a life which shall never be forsaken."