Your sister’s lips quiver in a smile
that belies the moisture in her eyes.
She says, "She wanted you to have it."
For scores of years, hung on a gold chain
around your neck, the locket seemed
a part of your body. My mind hesitates,
but the locket slips through trees,
oceans, rivers, barren hills, plains
to a hellish dawn that found you stunned
in the middle of the hall, your hands
clutching the glorious golden braids
the partisans had cut off. I snap
the locket open to see a lock
of your hair coiled under a yellowish glass.
I distinctively hear Granny’s stern voice
rising above cries, "Go along, children!
This is nothing. Hair grows again." And
to you, "Nothing a good wig won’t cure.
A small price for a wrong love. Thank God
you came off this mess with your life."
Grandmother and her unshakeable beliefs!
But you and I? For I, who came too late to fetch
you away, to spare you that insult,
the lock of hair is a question mark,
of questions never asked. My fingers
click the lock closed—a fine object
of Florentine workmanship, of love knots
and rings, now in my hand, one of the Earth’s
countless, deciduous things.
Leaving the Holocaust Museum
Perfection was the pond, a circle cut by the Po
for two youngsters who sat at its smooth edge
unaware that time comes carrying a hatchet.
Living was mostly silence and waiting for the trout
to bite, then biking for ice cream to a shack
just where the river splits into innumerable
inlets before battling the sea,
waiting again until the smoke of dusk plunged
into black velvet night and then biking back
to the dividing poplar line to say "Ciao!
A domani!" And tomorrow, an always
opening future.
Cross and Star, Star and Cross. How
could they know that their dreams—tenuous
Saint Elmo’s fires—crawled
out of two separate graveyards?
Was the word love spoken? Were plans made?
Who can think of words which the gelid
northeast wind froze, the madman uttered,
the wild beast and the lamb cried?
Who can lead us back to vanished sites,
roundness of days slipping away?
Still the jar of my memory fills with a hollow
silence. And in that abode of life, for all
who lived, for all whose lives were dispersed
in the spaces of Europe, what is left for the living
is sorrow without sound, like the intake of air
before sobbing. Star and Cross, Cross and Star...
the never-ending story of lives to which,
on earth, grace was not granted, nor the plucking
of a four-leaf clover at the edge of a pond,
that shows the story of One Lord for all, Who
"per enigmate," allows parallel lines to meet
in His infinity.
Artic
You stepped over the unattended
threshold of a masculine landscape,
all rigor and wind-ablated angles,
distance no horizon line delimits,
no seasons link to rhythms. You face
a never-setting light which radiates
and falls upon itself—realm of silence
and utter solitude. Your Protean mind
adapts in a flash of white and ice—
while your thoughts slip away,
like candid-blue foxes
at the booms of calving ice cliffs.
