Russian Beggarwoman II

                                                            After Ernst Barlach, bronze sculpture

She sits with one arm extended, hand cupped
for whatever might be placed there.
Her covered head rests on her skirt.
She curves into beauty not defined by her face
we can’t see—graceful fingers that in a different life
might play the piano, flute. She is the essence
of silence, but must have sat on a busy street,
brown shoes and black passing by.
Did she get used to being ignored?
During the hours rung by bells
did she think of a child to feed? I, too,
might have spurned this woman in the flesh,
forgetting my grandmother who once knocked
on doors in the countryside where she lived—
houses left unpainted with wood stacked on porches—
asking for food not for herself but my mother
whose boots were held together with safety pins.
Someone filled a shoebox full, enough
for them both, and they sat on the cold ground
and divided the bread, the meat, the sweetness of cake.


                                           Ekphrasis, 2008

The Visionary

                                                          After Ernst Barlach, relief,
                                                           Hamburg Memorial, 1931

A woman in profile looking
not at us but to the future,
her daughter’s head against
her breast. Their dresses
press together, and they wear
no shoes. There is nowhere to go.

What she sees now
isn’t the hunger of the first war,
women in line for bread while
husbands, fathers fight in the trenches.

She sees bombs that will fall
on Hamburg. Streets and canals
on fire, people who’ve fallen asleep
from the fumes, others stumbling
over charred corpses, and there’s
that boy in the distance behind
his mother whose clothes
have caught fire. He’s smothering
the flames with his hands.


                                       Nimrod, 2008