Daily Poem

Chop Sui Generis

They were one of a kind, the only proper way

To finish a Chinese meal, little white balls,

We called them mothballs, and to this day

There has never been anything like them: one trawls

Through history in search of something similar.

Impossible.  It was sui generis and lives in memory

Alone.  How could it be otherwise? We are

Creatures of our own experience, and chicory

Cannot be confused with coffee, pickles out of a barrel

Half-sour like nothing else, so too the vanilla

Scoops after chow mein or chop suey, the El

Overhead, the late afternoon rain, keeps falling.

It is sometime in late 1944 and we are in Brooklyn.

On the other side of the ocean, if I had known,

Uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents were murdered.

Not in anonymous millions, but one by one,

Each alone.  I was four years old, afraid

Because my mother and her mother remembered

What I had never known, could not imagine, made

Aware only decades later when no one was left to ask

Why did they look at me that way and say my task

Was to eat my food, grow strong, and be a mensch.

If I had seen the smoke on the horizon and smelled the stench

From the other side of the world, I never could have grown:

But not long after, one after another my grandparents died,

and then my mother fell apart.  I cried,

of course, but did not understand.  In a dark

Chinese restaurant, no matter where, after the chow

Mein or the chop suey, I order vanilla ice-

Cream, little round white balls, very stark,

Not kosher but still sacred, like prayers that splice

The Sabbath to the ordinary week and watch the flow

of history as Havdallah candles twist and glow.