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
