My mother has not mourned her desolation then,
is not mourning the disappointment of now,
and will not mourn the future, her cherished hope.
I, on the other hand, know but to mourn my past and my present
And to despair my future,
(which is too but preemptive mourning).
When the Messiah comes.
He will transform our days of mourning to
days of rejoicing
But the Messiah will not visit us.
The Messiah will not visit my mother
For she has not days of mourning
to turn to joy.
And he will not visit me for I refuse to relinquish my pain
for his fickle joy.
To disown the pain that had given shape to my days,
(as the jug’s emptiness fashions its form),
for a promise of happiness,
happiness that has,
weaved in and out of my life
while only the mourning remained.
Note: The midrash says that our fasr days will turn into holidays after the coming of the Messiah. For me, happiness is so ephemeral and passes so quickly I am not so sure that I will be will to trade in my days of sadness and pain which are so much more substantial.
The relatives who died “in the war”
have faded in and out of our lives.
Not alive,
But then not dead,
gone or lost in the war,
maybe once or twice mentioned as dead or killed,
but this is stated
with such dispassion
that it seems not true.
So I am going to Auschwitz
to give them life,
to find them within the ledgers and the Lagers
within the piles of shoes,
within the ashes.
For you cannot be destroyed unless you were once alive
So amongst the destruction I will prove their existence,
like a latter-day Descartes,
“You were killed
therefore you were“
and I will grieve.
Note: I wrote this poem before my trip to Auschwitz, a fantasy that there I will feel that I had all this family that I knew little of their existence and by experiencing their death I will somehow I can make them part of my life.
I used to be angry with my parents
For having been damaged,
For the sadness I have.
I couldn't hold onto the anger long
Because they were more a victim than I.
So it dispersed
To other facets of my life
And toward myself.
With my parents I was left with
Acceptance and restraint.
But the quiet has had its cost in passion
And I am afraid that when the time comes to mourn
I will find no source of tears
With which to weep.
Sere and rigid.
In the valley of a thousand stones
I will be yet another
Shiny and smooth
Unfissured
Note: A poem about insulation and the price we pay.
The souls of the dead lie dormant
under the filmy wrapping of the years
in anticipation
like a who child hides beneath a blanket waits
to be discovered.
Our cries of protest do not move them
nor do our tears of indignation,
they huddle tighter at the bolts of anger .
But when we whisper their names
and cry tears of longing that they have yet to know.
Then the warmth of the tears caresses their foreheads
and they blink open their eyes,
astonished
and stir themselves, loosening their limbs,
to fly down to our dreams
Note: So much of what is written on the Holocaust is blustery rhetoric
or self righteous indignation. Better we should cry.
If, as the Rabbis say,
Each life has a meaning,
Then each death should have its meaning too.
A tear, a shiver
A murmur
“Of Blessed Memory”
after a name.
Even just a glimpse of a memory
Like the flicker of a lamp.
But a death unmourned,
unnoted,
is a cruelty that never should have been created.
It is a cruelty beyond flames,
beyond dust.
Note: Only about half the victims names are recorded in Yad Vashem
Inhabitants of entire towns were killed with no one to remember them. Not every victim has a name and that in some ways is the greatest destruction to have lived and not leaving any memory behind.
It is a time of mourning in Israel,
grandparents mourn their grandchildren
and children their parents.
An entire country versed in mourning
except for me.
Amid the mourners' wails
my grandparents hold their faces earthbound
to catch some of the tears deemed for others.
Tears they have never known for all died with them,
except a few.
And those feared to not cease crying,
so they never started.
They long to be mourned
but I who have never known their embrace, cannot.
I cry not rivulets,
but meager tears,
which can rinse no sorrow.
But I know a sadness
that we share.
This too is a link
and it will have to suffice, as yet.
It is a time of mourning and I sit among the unmourned.
Note: While I was dealing with issues of the failure of the survivors to mourn their relatives was a time of terrorists suicide bombings. So I encountered heart wrenching mourning of people dying before their times interposed with my own family’s failure to mourn. This poem expresses the desire to mourn my grandparents even a little like the mourning I saw and heard then in Israel.
Yom Kippur Eve,
and the photographs
trom before the Holocaust.
Neighbors and relatives
who were probably murdered,
My mother doesn’t exactly know.
Some of the names I knew and forgot,
and some I never knew
because my mother stopped talking.
The next few middle of the nights I heard her in the hallways
and the rattling of the tea kettle in the kitchen.
So I don’t ask her again.
I just take out the pictures now,
and prop them up on my bed
To ask for their forgiveness that I haven’t mourned so well .
But maybe not forgiveness,
Because that means regret and change,
and I’m only doing the best I am able
so I can’t regret that.
And as far as change I don’t think things will be any different next year.
But if they can forgive,
then they can also love
and know the responsibility of being loved.
So maybe they can understand,
I ask for that.
Because on Yom Kippur the High Priest
sacrificed two goats
one for his family
and another, the scapegoat
for them,
the multitude.
There are supposed to be two
and I am but one.
Note: This is a poem about the responsibility to talk about and mourn
thwe victims versus the need to protect my mother from the pain.
It is unfortunately not a zero sum situation so I feel the need to ask the pardon
of those who get the short end of the stick.