Hello Poetry
Submit your work and get some sparkles! Create free account
השואה גוססת...the Sho'ah is dying © STEPHAN PICKERING / חפץ ח"ם בן אברהם 30 Sivan 5778 / 13 June 2018 revised: 1 Tammuz 5758 / 14 June 2018 2 Tammuz 5778 / 15 June 2018 3 Tammuz 5778 / 16 June 2018 I. and cantillated poetry -- memory being automatic editing -- may not be enough. what was not a reality may never be a reality, may never be a memory. soon, survivors will be silent, and the concierge of film and tape and books will whisper in library corridors. the villanellesque windows of constantly chanting 'disaster' and 'master' are shattering, an amphigouri of shadows and mirrors... II. I stand on the balconies of quantum strings: Auschwitz made my forebears more Yehu'dit than Moshe. No one bears witness for the witness. -- Paul Celan, 1971. Speech-grille & selected poems [trans. Joachim Neugrosche] (E.P. Dutton), 1-255 (241) the horizon is grey, in Poland 2018, the ash still creating a haze, specks on the leaves, the shoulders, the watch face on my wrist having no hands... III. how is the memory of a paternal relative kept 'alive'? she remains like a flickering match growing fainter in what will be a night of receding possibilities, shadows be-ing alongside my own. I have one colour 1941 photograph of her. like salt held on the tongue she is carried in my mind. she would not, a decade later in Rosemead, speak of the Kingdom of Night. one of the fading blue numbers stamped (not tattoed) on her left forearm in 1942 was a four. she would stare intently into my eyes, turn her arm over, the four becoming a chair... it was Garcia Lorca in 1928 who said 'verde que te quiera verde'... she loved green, even the green stained gargoyles she was painting in Paris... on a sidewalk caught up in a christianist SS roundup 16 July 1942, the Rafle du Velodrome d'Hiver, her painting fingers crushed. soon she was on a rattling box car in August 1942, sent to the East... she was gone in 2006...but her dreams are still in me... IV. teaches Reb Ya'akov Glatshteyn... Like a tiny candle over each grave, a cry will burn, each one for itself. 'I am I' -- thousands of slaughtered I's will cry in the night: 'I am dead, unrecognized'. -- Ya'akov Glatshteyn / Yankev Glatshteyn / Jacob Glatstein, 1987. 'I have never been here before', p. 111 in: Ya'akov Glatshteyn, 1987. Selected poems of Yankev Glatshteyn [ed./trans. R.J. Fein] (Jewish Publication Society), 1-215 [Yiddish & English] V. let us compell trolls among us to remember that, at its peak, their grandparents' vaticanist Auschwitz was burning 12,000 of us every 24 hours... when it was happening sound still reaches us in 2018. and yet. when it was happening, few were listening, but now it is bashert / inevitable my soul hears nothing else. the 'orderly' minds of the trolls among us are well-tended cemeteries without gravestones. the fire escapes are covered with psilocybin spores. long after midnight, when the darkened carnival is awake, there are survivors at the seder table awaiting the Missing One return with Her Sefer haZohar, pick up the empty cup. the underside of every leaf is fear, shadows gathering at the foot of our beds, transforming gristle into haze, made real by Hebrew letters and syllables. TO BE CONTINUED 'When I am in the darkness, why do you intrude?' -- Shabtai Zisel / 'Bob Dylan', 1978 ******************* STEPHAN PICKERING / חפץ ח"ם בן אברהם Torah אלילה Yehu'di Apikores / Philologia Kabbalistica Speculativa Researcher לחיות זמן רב ולשגשג...לעולם לא עוד THE KABBALAH FRACTALS PROJECT IN PROGRESS: Shabtai Zisel benAvraham v'Rachel Riva: davening in the musematic dark
0
Jun 27, 2018
Jun 27, 2018 at 10:54 AM UTC
השואה גוססת...the Sho'ah is dying
השואה גוססת...the Sho'ah is dying © STEPHAN PICKERING / חפץ ח"ם בן אברהם 30 Sivan 5778 / 13 June 2018 revised: 1 Tammuz 5758 / 14 June 2018 2 Tammuz 5778 / 15 June 2018 3 Tammuz 5778 / 16 June 2018 I. and cantillated poetry -- memory being automatic editing -- may not be enough. what was not a reality may never be a reality, may never be a memory. soon, survivors will be silent, and the concierge of film and tape and books will whisper in library corridors. the villanellesque windows of constantly chanting 'disaster' and 'master' are shattering, an amphigouri of shadows and mirrors... II. I stand on the balconies of quantum strings: Auschwitz made my forebears more Yehu'dit than Moshe. No one bears witness for the witness. -- Paul Celan, 1971. Speech-grille & selected poems [trans. Joachim Neugrosche] (E.P. Dutton), 1-255 (241) the horizon is grey, in Poland 2018, the ash still creating a haze, specks on the leaves, the shoulders, the watch face on my wrist having no hands... III. how is the memory of a paternal relative kept 'alive'? she remains like a flickering match growing fainter in what will be a night of receding possibilities, shadows be-ing alongside my own. I have one colour 1941 photograph of her. like salt held on the tongue she is carried in my mind. she would not, a decade later in Rosemead, speak of the Kingdom of Night. one of the fading blue numbers stamped (not tattoed) on her left forearm in 1942 was a four. she would stare intently into my eyes, turn her arm over, the four becoming a chair... it was Garcia Lorca in 1928 who said 'verde que te quiera verde'... she loved green, even the green stained gargoyles she was painting in Paris... on a sidewalk caught up in a christianist SS roundup 16 July 1942, the Rafle du Velodrome d'Hiver, her painting fingers crushed. soon she was on a rattling box car in August 1942, sent to the East... she was gone in 2006...but her dreams are still in me... IV. teaches Reb Ya'akov Glatshteyn... Like a tiny candle over each grave, a cry will burn, each one for itself. 'I am I' -- thousands of slaughtered I's will cry in the night: 'I am dead, unrecognized'. -- Ya'akov Glatshteyn / Yankev Glatshteyn / Jacob Glatstein, 1987. 'I have never been here before', p. 111 in: Ya'akov Glatshteyn, 1987. Selected poems of Yankev Glatshteyn [ed./trans. R.J. Fein] (Jewish Publication Society), 1-215 [Yiddish & English] V. let us compell trolls among us to remember that, at its peak, their grandparents' vaticanist Auschwitz was burning 12,000 of us every 24 hours... when it was happening sound still reaches us in 2018. and yet. when it was happening, few were listening, but now it is bashert / inevitable my soul hears nothing else. the 'orderly' minds of the trolls among us are well-tended cemeteries without gravestones. the fire escapes are covered with psilocybin spores. long after midnight, when the darkened carnival is awake, there are survivors at the seder table awaiting the Missing One return with Her Sefer haZohar, pick up the empty cup. the underside of every leaf is fear, shadows gathering at the foot of our beds, transforming gristle into haze, made real by Hebrew letters and syllables. TO BE CONTINUED 'When I am in the darkness, why do you intrude?' -- Shabtai Zisel / 'Bob Dylan', 1978 ******************* STEPHAN PICKERING / חפץ ח"ם בן אברהם Torah אלילה Yehu'di Apikores / Philologia Kabbalistica Speculativa Researcher לחיות זמן רב ולשגשג...לעולם לא עוד THE KABBALAH FRACTALS PROJECT IN PROGRESS: Shabtai Zisel benAvraham v'Rachel Riva: davening in the musematic dark
Written by
Jun 27, 2018
Jun 27, 2018 at 10:54 AM UTC
Request permission to use this poem