1979, A live broadcast, my father bid me come
to our new color TV set, the high pitched whine
it gave off muted by meaning
"remember this moment" he said
and we watched, in awed silence as
two men, Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin shook hands
and our President presided
a cold peace at last
In retaliation for... Sadat was later shot through
the skull and died on a stage in a pool of warm blood
surrounded by his brethren

A letter dated 1944
My father's fingers trembled with it in his hands
He brought it out to show me
"I am the only survivor...all the rest are gone...
I am going to Israel"
Written hastily with pen and ink, our last
surviving relative who we know not of
bid farewell to Russia and was on track to a new land from the wellspring
of grief and ******

A Jew, my father
A half Jew am I and would have been all the same
to the **** killing machine I thought one languishing summer day
as I ate unripe apples with small wormholes at a farm
full of horses
Safe in the quiet, if uncaring peace of a world far away
from dead Nazis and the abandoned killing centers


Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, 2003
We walked through at night, my husband and I
A large empty space in a city without largeness or emptiness
We walk without recognition
as it is now just a place and not only a shrine
But I linger to look at one corner
At an embedded sculpture of confused cement blocks
jagged angles and useless plains, rendered in immobile lasting cement
a testament to futility
It is pain, frustration and the sickness of human violence--
Itzak Rabin
who was shot and bled to death
in a crowd in the dust of his also unknown and forgotten ancestors
in retaliation for the hope of peace

News of more bombs today
Fresh death
Mangled human potential rendered useless
In retaliation for...