At the Holocaust Memorial in Prague
After Jan Zwicky
Fourteen lines of names are mine—
I fold my body low next to the lettered wall.
Tourists press play on their audio guides
and a voice in every language says
I should be dead. I do not move. Years pass
backwards and suddenly I’m six. My mother wails,
I hold the doubled echoes of her weeping. She’s caught
by that same patch of white brick wall
tattooed with thin red lines. She cannot move,
the only time she let me see her cry.
Our bodies stunned in one place
at different times. If only I could touch her now…
breath again reaches me and I rise
to go out of there, squinting into bone grey light.
*
Last Date
When you tell me you’re German I hold back,
wait until our second date to ask
what your Grandfather did during the war.
You wince and hold your breath— you knew
this was coming; you tell me about the bone handle
knife you eyed as a child, how he gave
it to you before he died.
On our third date, you invite me over to make soup.
I watch your long fingers slice carrots, the well-worn
bone hilt resting easy against your palm, the knife’s edge
bobs up and down, thuds orange circles that roll
easily away. I watch you carve the chicken open,
and wonder if this blade cut through the skin
of any one of my ancestors.
*
Doykait
My bubbie survived that great war,
to fry latkes for me in fragrant oil
in a quiet house by a ravine,
the air yellow with sweet onion.
As I grow, I find her grief
inside my pelvis, teach myself alchemy
from scratch, locate her pain,
turn it into another kind of gold.
I do not labour at liberating ghosts
only to watch as it happens
all over again:
a young woman’s brown cheek
trembles under her keffiyeh
as she kneels over her mother’s
dead body. This moment will lodge
inside her ovaries, play out
in her daughter’s heart.
Generations later, a girl will leave
someone she loves, as I have— cry out
why does it never feel safe to stay?
*
Emily Kedar is a poet and writer from Toronto, Canada. Her work has most recently appeared in The Malahat Review, The Maynard and The Bellevue Literary Review. She is currently pursuing an MFA from Pacific University.
Powerful poems, Emily–especially, for me, “Last Date.” Thank you.
I cannot find words to describe my response to these works. I simply thank you for writing and sharing them here.
I admire all of these poems, but would like to ask a question about the third one. The reference to ovaries reminds me of a medical study that traces famine in the mother to heart disease in a later child. I just wondered if the poet was aware of this.