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Black and White Photograph of Hungarian Jews
After a photograph from
The Holocaust Chronicle
She bears the weight of grandmothers,
stooped in a checkered jacket and kerchief,
clutching a bundle and a doll, the smallest
grandchild beside her, possibly three,
head uncovered, holds her sister’s right hand.
In the left, the sister has a small white bag.
The tallest girl follows,
hands in pockets, legs bare—
one foot firm on the ground,
the other with only heel touching.
The oldest girls have identical coats,
belted in back, decorated with a button.
They are walking along a railroad track
at Auschwitz, beside an electrical fence
that keeps even the birds away.
No face is visible, nor can we see
those who walk in front or behind.
I hear young voices—How much farther?
Where are we going? Will Mother be there?
Their mother must have bought the coats,
new shoes that sent the girls running
to their papa, all shouting at once, See?
Prism Review, 2009
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Old Woman
After Robert Capa, photograph of a
refugee in Barcalona, 1939
sitting on a low stone
bench wearing a skullcap
under a scarf, one hand cupped
over a handkerchief, you
don’t have a suitcase,
just an open tattered box
that holds a blanket with a memento
on top, and your eyes don’t say
what the lines in your
hands do: kneading bread,
hanging clothes to dry,
lifting the heavy iron of a past
that will follow you and your
shadow, long skirt in motion,
your possessions held
so the extra warmth won’t spill
this January day that’s taking
you to wherever you are going.
Kakalak, 2009 (forthcoming)
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The Parents
After Käthe Kollwitz, woodcut
Now that their child is dead
they have become one body.
Grief brings them to their knees,
each holding the other’s weight.
The husband has covered his face
while the other hand is held loosely
at his wife’s side. Her face is against
his arm—surely his sleeve is wet
from her tears. We can’t see her hands
which must lie in the folds of his coat.
Long ago these hands caressed one another
in passion, and now must find their way
back to the tasks of the day—
cutting bread, pouring milk. But to eat without appetite
in a house familiar and strange. Plums,
easily bruised, in a bowl on a table
where the three of them sat.
The clock on the wall encasing time,
the cuckoo’s call now too shrill.
Dos Passos Review, 2006
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Woman with Dead Child
After Käthe Kollwitz, etching
Death has made them both naked.
The mother is sitting, holding her child,
her mouth and chin pressed against the child’s chest
so that we see only the lines in her forehead
and her closed eyes.
The infant I carried six months
lived through the night. When I asked
to see her, I was told to wait until morning.
Then I had to give a name to what was only spirit,
and she had to be buried
since she weighed more than a pound.
It was wrong of them not to let me see her,
wrong of me to wait months before going
to stand over the marker in the Louisiana sun.
The day comes back to me now,
and how months later,
I found, in a folder, a certificate
my husband had put there--
the smallest of prints:
curve of the right foot, curve of the left.
Kakalak, 2006
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