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Poems from Chopin's Piano |
Eastern Europe After the War | ||
Wisps of memory ragged dips in the grass |
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Counting the Holocaust |
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He tried to get a handle on the Holocaust: let others immerse themselves in questions of time and intention He would leave the Nazis to history the endless litany of camps to architects and statisticians Let the professors tussle over Hitler's evil genius the altruism of Schindler the German muse of Goldhagen He wanted to know one thing only — what six million of anything added up to . . . and so he counted: grains of uncooked rice until the gallon jugs he dropped them into filled his kitchen un- matched contact lenses newly-minted pennies then soda pop bottle caps battered shoe boxes abandoned valises and six million periods in 12-point Gothic type: thirty-seven hundred and four unconsumed pages He was counting the Holocaust and he kept counting. |
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A Dance on the Poems of Rilke | ||
I remember a Czech dancer who danced on the poems of Rilke. In the particular hell of Ravensbrück where women of every European nation slaved a woman could be duly tortured for using rags of Rilke’s heart each soaring leap of the spirit each lunge |
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Names on a List |
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January 23, 1995 David Ben-Zino, Adi Rosen, Damian Rosovski — Who were these soldiers Islamic Jihad killed? In Tel Aviv I had slept in a young soldier’s room — my shirts hung for a while in his closet, my head crushed his pillow, and my feet drank the chill from his floor. Was he among the murdered, this only son of my friends? No, he was not in Netanya in the third week of January, he was not in Tel Aviv, not in Israel, not in the Middle East at all. Then let us not speak his name, not even in a whisper: who are we to trust the gods or the unseen powers? My friends shall keep their son, and I will sleep without dreaming. But who were these young soldiers? Rafael Mizrahi, Yehiel Sharvit, Yuval Tuvya — how did they live and what did they live for? A month earlier, in Jerusalem, I saw two soldiers at ease at the Haas Promenade. They were there to guard children and the teachers of these children and Uzis hung at their backs in stark diagonals. They looked like soldiers, but I could see they were really older brothers and would-be boyfriends, and one joked with the teacher whose clouds of copper hair outshone the midday sun; the other ate his lunch and half-sprawled in the scorched grass. I saw their sisters and cousins in the Judean Desert, in the spillway of light that opened into dark, conflicted Jericho, and they were waiting in the alleyways of the Old City where tribes of tourists materialized from stone and filled their arms with Yemenite jewelry and Druse cloth. I understand, but who was Gilad Gaon? who Eran Gueta? who was David Hasson? who Eitan Peretz? I saw them in Abu Ghosh, wolfing down hummus in olive oil, small hills of falafel. And they were at the bus terminal in Tel Aviv, hauling their battered duffels at the Bahá’í shrine in Haifa keeping watch in the sacred gardens and I saw them anointed with fire in the sunset that blossomed over Ashkelon. But you know these words are lies and your hearts are not fooled by my stories for Yaron Blum is dead Ilie Dagan is dead Amir Hirschenson is dead Anan Kadur is dead Maya Kopstein is dead Soli Mizrahi is dead Avi Salto is no longer with us Daniel Tzikuashvili is no longer with us All the bright young flames of Israel’s sun are dying and I am here speaking their names to you. |
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