ס'איז אן עמעסע מאיסע

[sovay]

April is National Poetry Month. Today is Yom HaShoah. The poem below was published in 2005 as the epilogue to strange_selkie's A Verse from Babylon, her funny, brilliant, burning novel about the artists of the Vilna Ghetto, one of whom was her great-aunt. It is reprinted in my collection A Mayse-Bikhl, but I don't think I've ever put it online before. For memory.

Martyrology

We spoke in letters of fire, wrote in flame
dashed black and white as the interstices
of a scroll, crowned and fringed, the void
where all unspoken things gather, all lost
words remain: in smeared ink and dull
lead, on paper faded brown, acid, time's
kindling; the language of cold fingers
and bruised faces, iron rails and the stage
whose plays had only one ending. Ash
blows where words burned: a diaspora
of ghosts. Unwritten lyrics, music half
transcribed; a twist of rusted wire, papers
flaked like bone in the earth. Cobblestones
have forgotten our footsteps, the weight
of our bodies—mouths open to the earth,
eyes open to the sky. A blunted bullet;
a splintered lens. Chips in a brick wall.
The years grow over like grass. We kept
songs like prayers on the tongue, like
curses, the jargon of angels hymned
bitterly while we held each other fast:
hold us now. From lead and gold, we wrote
each other: from fire, sing us now again.

Whether you grew up on pictures of victimhood, or on stories of poets and partisans, this is an awesome set of photos.

Comments

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

Your poem really epitomizes the feeling I had at the Yiddish book center in Amherst, MA, looking through Yiddish plays and sheet music and knowing that I held something that was once vital and everyday which had accidentally become hallowed and fleeting.

Thank you for writing this and for sharing the glorious pictures. I am amazed that I've never seen those, given the depth of my high school age obsession with WWII primary sources, particularly about the holocaust.

May we all remember as clearly, and with as much depth, but perhaps more understanding in 50 years.

[sovay]

Your poem really epitomizes the feeling I had at the Yiddish book center in Amherst, MA, looking through Yiddish plays and sheet music and knowing that I held something that was once vital and everyday which had accidentally become hallowed and fleeting.

You should write a poem about that. It is such a strange process. Just the act of needing to be remembered confers such weight.

I am amazed that I've never seen those, given the depth of my high school age obsession with WWII primary sources, particularly about the holocaust.

I don't think I'd seen any of them. (I had read about the Jewish Brigade.) I don't know if they change the narrative of the Holocaust for me, because I did not grow up only with stories of victimhood, but they are stories I did not know and I am glad to glimpse them. I loved the commenter recognizing their grandfather in the photo of the man with the "Gift for Hitler." I want to know more about the woman with the radiant face; I hope the rest of her life was as charmed as that moment.

May we all remember as clearly, and with as much depth, but perhaps more understanding in 50 years.

Amen.