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

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

And respects, too, paid later than I would have liked.