Yahrzeit
The kitchen counter
polished slab of granite
flickers with recollection.
We meet after midnight.
I can’t sleep. You
will never awaken,
never know of my defection
my sad excavations
50 years’ reflection, tarnishing love.
My eyes close, I stumble toward bed
but turn back to check
and recheck the faucets, the stove
twice, thrice in your memory.
Is it enough? Will it ever be?
~
History Lesson
In Borough Park
the streets were paved with refugees.
The man who sold bananas from a pushcart
had blue numbers on his arm
and who knows what in his heart.
I was six and knew practically nothing.
Progress had been made.
My cousins had been incinerated in batches
but we could be done all at once, in a flash
(“brighter than a thousand suns,” they said).
Early one April morning
they let us eat our Wheaties in front of the TV
to see the star’s first coast-to-coast appearance:
a titanic geyser of steam and rock
erupting into billowing clouds.
(It really was a mushroom!)
Then it was off to school, as usual.
Later that week they gave us all steel dog-tags (just like real GIs!)
named and numbered so that people would know
what we used to be.
~
A Visit to Berlin
I awoke In Berlin. A grey tram
Rattled through grey morning;
behind the scrim of history
fear and forgetfulness wrestled
drunkenly on the stairs of the U-Bahn.
We stayed in the old Jewish quarter, just
down Grosse Hamburgerstrasse from a brick building,
once (a plaque told us) a school for Jewish girls.
Alongside our hotel:
a cemetery whose headstones had been pulverized
not long before the skulls of its occupants’ sons and daughters.
It was nearly Christmas,
the populace in a gemutliche mood.
In the Yuletide markets
we too drank gluhwein and strolled, delighted,
amid sausages and crafts.
The Wall had gone down decades before,
the bloodlust
vaporized decades earlier along with Dresden
and eastern Europe.
Youth was everywhere, children
of a new century
enacting art in Kreuzberg and Neukoln.
We took the S-Bahn to the Judische museum; on the bus back
I heard Deutsch spoken as if for the last time
by ordinary volk
heading home, exhausted, after work.
Our last day, under the sublime spell of the Gemaldegalerie,
We missed the Memorial für die ermordeten Juden Europas
(there was no time!)
For months after, we told our friends
how much,
how very much we’d enjoyed Berlin.
_______
Carl Sherman has written about science, medicine, the mind and the brain for national magazines, newspapers, and websites. He has published four books. He writes poetry for his own enlightenment and delight, and the hope of sharing these with others. His poems have appeared in The RavensPerch, Eunoia, and Corona: an Anthology of Poems (Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, 2020). He lives in New York City.