To Three Friends on Yom haShoah

To the first

You are my friend and I care about you, have done

For years and probably always will, but, my friend,

You do not understand nor ever can,

Not in a thousand years, not at the end

Of time.  We meet and talk, sometimes for hours

And speak of politics and philosophy,

Or at least, I listen to your raves—but how is

It that you never I notice my silences, see

How I bite my tongue, and only later joke

About some trivial matter, some name of one

Who no longer matters: if I ever broke

Into our conversation—like a stone

Through the panes of a window, pain of a widow

Whose love was murdered, you would never know

Only that I had broken our trust, my silence

Necessary for our time together, old lonely men

Chatting together as though time were a mere pretence

And nothing passed between us that could mean

Anything significant, my tears my everlasting rage

Against the world that never understands.

I listen, nod, suggest a pun, as in a cage

A creature watches its keeper as he stands

Pretending to sympathize with my captivity

And share complaints about the cruel world

But fail to grasp the truth of such activity:

The wheel revolves forever, age after age,

No revolution reaches the ideal stage

When we are liberated, workers whirled

Into the great Land of Promise and Equality,

Finally free to take revenge on the oppressors,

Until then frustrated and disappointed, we

Observe the progress of the ignorant, source

Of all our woes, until the blows of mortality.

It is not that,  my friend, that’s not why I hide

In enigmatic grin and ironic pun.  I toss

Aside the opportunity to share with you the truth

To save our lovely chats, our friendly hours,

Like adolescents in old films, in a booth

Sharing a coke with two straws.  My sorrow springs

From another world, a conversation lost

In the blackness of Chronos whose echo rings

In a different language, neither shadow nor ghost.

To the second…

O you do, you do understand, very well, my friend,

Perhaps too well and yet not the conclusions you draw,

They are too personal, your pleas, I cannot send

Responses when you ask my advice, my help. Before

Another word is said, amidst the photographs

Of victims, emaciated, mangled, disappeared

Already before our eyes, not played for laughs

As in old movies with their tricks—all that we feared

When seen at first now made mundane and flat,

Masks of the grotesque.  You noodge and whine

Too much.  The pain is far too real, as when we sat

In the dark and watched the vampires, the mummies dine

On corpses in the crypt—we screamed in phoney fright—

We did not know then, and now you do, that night

Of endless nightmares was real, too real dreams,

And only understatement, constrained ironic silence,

Can ever be strong enough to gather up the beams

Of memory and shoot them into consciousness.

You write your essays every night, obsessed

With visions of the Holocaust—how could

You not—but I am bothered (as I shouldn’t be)

Because your images are too familiar; it would

Be better (prosaic thought) if they startled me

Out of sleep and made me hear what I never read.

The dreams were nightmares, ugly visions, dead

Souls forced into the madness of the other, he

Who created Hades out of literary corpses,

Wagnerian operas, Nietzschean travesties

And the hatred spewed over Goethe’s lovely pages

Until we were absorbed into their Reich of Plagues.

If you want to daven, daven, wind your tfillin,

And make the signs of your devotion, chaver mine;

Believe in the Almighty, sacrifice the sin

Away in a dreamed-of Temple: the Prophets shine

In the brilliance of their raging wit, the power

Of their voices transformed to sparks of law and light.

Bench for me, my friend, at the appointed hour

In a minyan of your choosing, that is your right

And privilege: for me, there is another path,

Not to righteousness or illumination.

The road is tangled with the roots and wrecks of wrath,

Stumbling blocks to reason, like those one finds on

The streets of Amsterdam and Rotterdam

Where the names of those who disappeared in smoke

May be recalled, where tears of pain and humiliation

Make anyone who tries to speak, gasp and choke.

To the Third…

In the chronology of war and genocide

the dates roll by much quicker than the agony

but I note them in my own childhood, decide

I was there on such a day and somewhere by

The sea or in a park with my mother, never then

Aware of anything amiss, except in the eyes

Of those who whispered over newspapers when

Someone shouted and bit her lip, such cries

Were not for the boy to hear.  But he sensed the gist

Of something deeply wrong with the world. The war

Meant old women fainted in the street, and when they kissed

Him the taste was bitter, like rotten meat, or a can

Of fish left overnight on the counter, flies

With ugly music slopping through blood-red stain.