Over glossy water the orange sun sets.
Children chase colored balls across pale dunes.
Gardens showcase salvia and year-round succulents.
Living in such paradise, why do tears so
inconsolably fall?
Despair is rooted deep inside, so deep
I cannot destroy it or wrest it out:
No hope, no light for a luminous future.
Inside my skin both contemporary
and unknown dread that make the teardrops fall.
Magnified by these tears, faces suddenly flash
like snapshots behind my eyelids—
snap, snap, snap.
Women in my lineage for an instant
show their wretched lovely faces, weeping.
When they took Beate to Belzyce and when they took
Ida,
and when they took Rosa to Riga in Latvia;
and Dina, when they took her too—
all in that terrible May of ’42 . . .
those tears, their tears are my tears.
When my own tears splash
then I see their faces flash—Ida, Rosa, Dina.
Didn’t know them, all my father’s sisters,
yet in that unexpected swimming back,
their held and smothered sobs I cry.
I realize their features, see their shining bones.
And ones I do not know, cannot even name.
Where is there comfort in the heart of the night?
This kinship of sorrow leans heavy into me.
Shakes the reign of reason, snaps it hard,
urging another terrified life into the burning.
When a martyr gives her life
who still carries the sorrow of the world?
Who could hold so much?
Who could cry it out?
Dina, Rosa, Beate—I cry with you.
In my fifty-odd years, only now, sometimes,
can I look at photos of the camps.
When they found those miles of caves,
dug underground with spoons,
they are passages that I know
covered in dirt
in my own heart.
Unlived futures.
Stunted dreams left buried.
Now I dig them out, handful by handful.
I carry my lineage in my cells and in my tears.
Families—the kinship I lack—
leaking out like star juice.
When they are true tears,
those in the deep behind me are also released.
It happens tear by tear.
What appears when I cautiously open my eyes?
Those broken lives, held for a moment, before me.
Turquoise cove and pod of easy swimmers.
And Something, a waif of a thing, emerges as the
sun sets:
That I have a voice here and now is where the hope
begins.
Then my small life, just as it is, is courage
happening.
Violet, ranunculus, tulip, forget-me-not.
Jasper sunset, celadon moon.
A dozen seasons give finally the space
to release these burning tears.