A child alone in a foreign land

never is solaced, but speaks at long years.

intervals, a ventriloquism of quiet rage,

in a woman.s voice at a civilized table.

Part of this truth we have heard before

but the unraveling of pain like the neuron.s path

is bristly and indirect, sparking at the undiscerned.

No old-testament god can be called on to explain

the gothic weight, the stone cold of her pain;

the woman knows how real are the helmeted folk,

the butchers who dreamed the grand dream.

Vivid in polished memory is the street

where she and her sister walked, where heils

rained iron around their thin forms; fear thrust

up their own arms, yet flailed the soldiers. fists.

There the fatal eroding blow which in England

claimed her sister.s blood-bound mind;

she now alone in England, her escape none at all.

 

Your parents, too, died in the war, the question

so politely purged of scaly truth.

Auschwitz slithers on clawed feet into darkness

as a child.s memory stops before silent walls

of an ungraved earth, where millions of cries

have become one miming cry which is her own,

where she is father, mother, all the earth.

 

I have brought lemon bread to my hostess.

That afternoon I had listened to a physician-poet

who tried to heal ancestral memory of slavery

with poems of black light and hope and old photographs

of the long dead. He thought memory of pain survived

could awaken purpose in youth who had no hope.

From him at the artistic celebration I had bought

a book of verse: from his wife I bought the bread.

 

We eat the lemon bread as my hostess speaks.

We eat to punish the British fosterer who calls her dirty.

We eat to stop the past from where her mother was taken

into the dark place where her father had disappeared,

the burning dark felt in the recesses of  numbered records.

We eat to push away the gargoyle who walks

in goose step against her heels, but his shadow is near.

We eat to stop our ears against the millions

of shackled children stumbling in the light,

a sound like human breath gasping for air.

 

Our hostess cuts another piece for her husband

who loves the richness of the lemon bread.

His voice pulls us politely back from pain.

We all speak of the bread in praise

for its tart sweetness. We restore the ordinary.

We all eat silently as if we were under a shawl.

We eat of the lemon bread; we eat her grief,

unable to solace the raging child, but in our nodding

silence to affirm her unending pain. We eat

to extend our human lives.

Early in my long marriage I would gaze

at the light radiance on my finger,

but without care I wore my rings at tasks,

in the muck of gardening, in fish scraping,

in tile scrubbing, often without gloves.

Twenty-five years grind down any marriage.

The grit.sharp surprises, jagged arguments,

debt, bankruptcy, and displacement.

In the Y pool I floated, knowing the weight

which all the years had layered down on us,

but I was on my way to a Ph.D.,

a swim before returning home from research,

a double respite from work and pressure.

In the water my ring shifting sparkle.

Later I ran from the bus for a magazine

and returned to engines rumbling.

Shimmering on my seat was a sequin.

I reached for it and touched hard, sharp stone.

I glanced down at the prongs on my finger.

I sat down, bus lurching forward, and gasped.

Lucky me, only my eyes had seen it.

I went back to Tiffany.s and early days

when all was beautiful and bright.

A new setting and a new appraisal,

diamond and platinum do rise in value.

Fast forward eighteen years.  He defeated

cancer, found a new career, and was retired

by 9/11. We both earned new degrees,

but have the same job or cannot find one.

Yet we have been to Alaska, the Grand Canyon,

Mesa Verde, and we walked to the pool at Zion.

 I give scholarly papers each year on many topics,

from Santa Fe to Washington, D.C.

 Two thousand eleven.I am in L.A.

Before my convention I twist my ring

and discover a crack through the platinum,

but the diamond seems calm and stable.

 

At Tiffany.s I realize I lack glam,

but I can afford a repair once more.

.Nearly lost the stone, too,.   says the jeweler;

.you wear the rings always: take them off gardening!.

How beautiful is my new ring! All gleam!

The diamond sits higher than I remember,

deep stars trembling light when I gesture.

I have been gardening, with gloves at times,

but I never slip the rings off my hand.

All seasons he and I entangle still--

our names intact on the simple band.

same stone, same two people deeply on fire.

	Mary had a little lamb
	It's fleece was white as snow.
	Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
	but this line has been crossed out