Good Friday 2020
_____
The wind groans with reluctance
Sends April snow in squalls—
a tossed and careless shawl
worn long and tired with this Day
No glimpse of sun
A dirge of snow surrenders on the grass
Winter making one more pass
among us
gray with grief
Due east of Rat Island
alone
Appropriate in name
Appropriate to this, the day
surrounded only
by the jealous surf
with hateful waves
surrounded by the howls of “crucify!”
“He is not ours!
They are not ours!
We are not ours!”
Send them all away
They belong to the island
to the ground
from which they came
Not for us to cry and claim
Their abandonment
Wooden boxes fill the
trench—
A Babi Yar
of our own doing
so it seems
and yet again...
Golgotha
In the bitterness
of heart there is
an island--
Hart—I think they call it
Both a prison and a graveyard
of NYC
A place “despised and rejected”
rejected of men
an island of sorrows...
and acquainted with grief....”
“...I see myself an ancient Israelite.
I wander o’er the roads of ancient Egypt
And here, upon the cross, I perish, tortured
And even now, I bear the marks of nails....”
--Yevgeni Yevtushenko
...inscribed on the palms of His hands....
Again—
There is an island
where scores of the forgotten lie
He knows them all by name
Today it binds my tongue
with bonds of sadness
It has traveled in the tides
of time to find us
Our Babi Yar has come for us
to take us to Hart Island
Unmarked
Unloved
Unclaimed
_____
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BabiJarravijn.jpg…
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio acknowledged that more people are being buried at the city's potter's field, but stressed that only the bodies of the unclaimed would be buried there.