(Instead of a) Friday Dispatch: Yom HaShoah

Trying to put it all in a poem

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Friday greetings on Thursday afternoon,

Today is Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, corresponding to the 27th day of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar. It was on this day in 1943 that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began. In commemoration, I tried to put some thoughts and feelings into a poem, which I humbly offer instead of a Friday Dispatch this week.

Shabbat Shalom and love,

Jena

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For better and for worse,
putting it in a poem
has always been my way,
easier somehow than saying
the words in real time
when my heart speeds up
and my mind stutters to a stop,
sense and courage escape
artists on the lam
while I sit there with sweat stains
under my arms,
forgetting I'm a person
with a voice that matters.

But what am I putting in this poem?
An ungraspable number?
A pithy slogan?
An angry first?
A head in my hands?
An olive branch?

A minute-long siren
and piercing silence,
flowers from rubble,
the moon witnessing time –
time of the essence
and indifferent
as the sleeping masses?

Maybe a mother hushing
her baby in terror,
or a song that dares
to reach for renewal
against its own better judgment?

The poem doesn't judge.
It doesn't berate.
It doesn't shy away
from the heat
or try to make you understand
how the heart works.

No, it rocks and bends,
bows and stands,
trembles towards stillness.

The poem atomizes
into particles you don't realize
you are breathing in
and you are breathing out,
and the breath and the poem
are the same, ethereal, essential,
everywhere and nowhere, like the God
in whose holy image we are created.

Oh, God.
Oh, Holy Mess.
Oh, Holocaust.
Oh, Remembrance.

Oh, troubled soul,
take this poem
from your pockets
and shake it loose
into the world, as if a poem
might carry something somewhere.

But what?
Hope? Solace? Memory?
Impossible reckoning of victimhood and power,
words hijacked, causes taken captive,
people sacrificed on the altars of otherness,
deemed enemies, deemed threats?

The poem, like the call,
comes from inside the house
where I write, hapless and hopeless,
a tiny person trying too hard.

We say, never again.
We say, not in our name.
We say, it's different, it's the same,
it's repackaged, it's complicated, it’s not.

I give up again.
I forgot I was putting it in a poem.
Space is limited
in the overhead bin.
Each family gets one suitcase.
You won't be needing that there.
Come with us.
No, we won't answer your questions.
Where are you taking us?
Stop, stop, stop, no!

It's for the greater good.
It's for the emperor,
the Führer, the reich.
Make it great again.
Take it all this time.

I put it in a poem
and shudder.
”Don’t forget who we are”
can mean so many things.

I don't even want this poem.
The words cling to my skin
like filth I can't scrub off.

But I must speak
into the void of these jumbled times,
when nothing makes sense,
when the island I stand on
keeps getting smaller,
when I reach for your hand
and six million hands reach back
insistent, imploring.

Don't forget us.
Don't forget us.

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