V. The Poem and Its Story

THE KISS
”People tell me that when I am in heaven they
will remember this picture.” ─ Alfred Eisenstaedt

It was perfect timing. V-J Day, August 14, 1945
at 5:51 ET when Alfred Eisenstaedt,
barely 5 feet tall (small enough to be invisible)
was on the prowl in Times Square with his Leica lll
(the artist as predator) for the instant
he could capture before it fled, as he crouched
south of 45th Street, looking north, where Broadway
and 7th Avenue intersect, in the still-perfect
light of the late summer afternoon.

Others claimed to be that sailor
and that nurse in the iconic photo,
but it was George Mendonça, in his navy blues, age 22,
who ran from Radio City Music Hall
when the projector stopped
midway through ”A Bell for Adano”
(because he heard the Japanese surrendered)
to find Greta Zimmer, age 21,
a nurse in her starched uniform.
stunned by the news and standing on the street,
(clutching the embroidered purse her parents had given her)
directly in Mendonça’s way,
though it easily could have been someone else.

Just then, Eisenstaedt’s practiced eye
spied the contrast of dark blue and white
as Mendonça, completely enthused, swooped down,
grabbing Greta in that awkward, contorted embrace,
while Eisenstaedt, in 1/1000 second
caught them both and got his shot,
and ran back to his studio with his prey,
an instant of time frozen for posterity.

In the darkroom he might have laughed out loud
(he’d been gifted by his muse with a detail
he had done nothing to deserve)
when he saw the angle of her perfectly stockinged leg
(she said she always made sure her seams were straight)
turning up and taking shape,
with her sensible, white nurse’s shoe lifting off the ground
floating up from the developing fluid into the light.
Attaching it by clothespins to the line to dry
he could already see it in the pages of ”Life.”

Outside the picture:

Of the three, Eisenstadt, Mendonça and Zimmer,
Eisenstaedt and Zimmer could only collide
because he left Tezew, Poland just in time, and her parents
sent her, age 15, and her sisters from Austria in ’39.
In that split second when his camera caught
the angle of her leg, as it left the ground,
she had yet to discover her parents had died in the camps.

That war was our last good fight.
Liberty and justice were ours and God
was on our side, and no one could fault
George Mendonça from Rhode Island,
brash and unabashedly proud in his uniform,
hugging his way through the crowd,
before he grabbed Greta and kissed her
while another girl standing behind him,
who would be his bride,
said years later that she didn’t mind.
Eisenstaedt never married,
but forever after had his Cinderella.

Though we try to salvage what we can
from time’s relentless tide,
the context of this photo is fading into oblivion.
All that will remain is a boy
kissing a girl in a white uniform.
But there was once a time we were relieved
and secure that God’s will had been done
on earth as it was in heaven,
confirming what we believed when we sat
at wooden desks in rows with our hands,
folded in prayer, all our voices in unison,
our hearts and minds so sure
about our blessed America being the best
of all possible worlds
in those faraway days.
—Roberta Chester

The story: Thanks to ”The Writers Almanac,” which gifts me via my e mail a daily poem and a list of historical events which happened on that particular day, I read it was the photographer Alfred Eisenstadt’s birthday. He had taken many memorable photographs, but the one he will be most remembered for is ”V-J Day in Times Square,” which appeared on the cover of Life magazine shortly after V-J Day celebrating the surrender of the Japanese and the subsequent end of the Second World War. The iconic photo of the young sailor grabbing the nurse and kissing her epitomized the euphoria that the war had ended and captured the imagination of the entire country, expressing in that photograph what a thousand words could not convey.
What surprised me was that the photograph and the back story inspired my own digression about my childhood school days and America at a time in history when the country was so justifiably proud.
Note: Ernst Leitz, the owner of the Leica company, was responsible for ”The Leica Freedom Train”, which helped Jews to leave Germany by ”assigning” hundreds to non-existent overseas sales offices.

***

A DIFFERENT RAIN

Morning...
I listen for the soft sounds
The automatic filling of
The ice-maker in the refrigerator
The murmur of my wife
As she turns in her sleep
The distant rumble of the train

It rained last night
Making this morning’s silence
This morning’s click-click-click
Of the battery operated clock important

It is always silent when the rain stops
Always there is a reminder
Of where it has been
The moisture drips evaporates but slowly
For awhile it almost feels
As if it could come again but it doesn’t
It is always a different rain that nourishes the land
A different rain that reminds us of the others

                                                                   — Ed Bearden

The story: This poem was a gift. I looked outside at the rain and the poem came to me almost complete. It is written without punctuation and all the first words of each line are in capitals, both things I almost never do. I think the lack of punctuation gives the poem an unfinished feel, which of course it is, and of unfinished events. Some of the lines are longer too, which contribute to the meditative quality of the poem. There is a calming that comes with simple basic routines. The familiar things that ground us, stabilize us in troubled times, times of change and loss. There’s hope that things might stay as usual, come again. I really like the idea of come again, for this poem. Because the poem is about generations the number of times can’t be known. The first line of the poem sets the tone. I had originally written Mornings... When I removed the plural ’s’ it changed everything. Morning is a new day, a new beginning, but morning can also be spelled mourning. Each of the two spellings can describe beginnings and endings. The second, rather than a new beginning, now denotes a grieving and has a melancholy tone. That little shift of direction is the way poetry works. I generally prefer poetry that tells little stories.
The title of the poem is about generations —each rain a new (or different) generation, written as my generation is now the older and the most vulnerable. Moisture that evaporates slowly, describes the slow way we lose contact with the generation before us, drop by drop. All I have left of the generation before me is my mother’s younger brother and anything I can remember. The night before I wrote the poem I had a dream about my father, so some of that is in the poem. I hadn’t thought about him for a while. It felt as if he could have been here, but of course he wasn’t. The lines that speaks of my father reads ”For awhile it almost feels / As if it could come again but it doesn’t.” There is a sense of finality in the line, the poem. Each new rain is a metaphor for a new generation. Each rain (generation) slowly evaporates, then is gone. Each rain leaves behind its ”nourishment” in the soil for the one that follows. I especially like the last line. In each current generation you can see a reflection of the one that preceded it. I see my own ears in those of my nephew.

***

SONATA OF A BAG LADY IN THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

The person opposite watches my feet
laid out upon my pawn-shop sneakers.
Her stares prick my toes like pins.
Toes free to stretch! No longer bent to work
like seamen below deck on a schooner,
or captives shackled to their oars
in ancient quinquiremes,
Day in, day out, rowing, rowing.
Toes free on the marble floor!
Free from the pavement’s heat,
burning my soles like hell-fire
licking relentlessly the feet of sinners.
Free from the pain of calluses
grown purple and luxuriant
as garbage bags on sidewalks,
where newspapers, piled high as pillows,
are my roadside bed. My toes then curled
in their alien prisons for the night.

Toes, free as fingers on piano keys,
now playing a sonata silently
upon my sneakers. The person opposite
stares, her eyes round-up my errant toes,
return them to captivity again.
She does not heed the music they have made.

                                                                 —Joan Netta Burstyn

***

The story: During the 1970s, I sometimes arranged to meet my husband after a meeting, in the reading room at the New York Public library. Exhausted from a meeting one day, I just sat for a while, watching the people in the room. Opposite me sat an elderly woman who seemed to have with her all her belongings. They were in two small bundles on the floor beside her. She was still wearing her overcoat while reading a book that she held on her lap. I noticed that she had taken off a well-worn pair of sneakers and that her bare feet were resting on the floor in front of her.
At that time, there were plenty of people in New York City whose only home seemed to be within the doorways of buildings. This woman, however, had chosen to come in out of the hot summer day to the library. Surely, then, she was a well-educated person. She was down on her luck, perhaps, but not without a desire to maintain her literary interests. Where better than the New York public library to find both air-conditioning and intellectual nourishment?
As I thought about this, I realized that the woman was aware of my interest in her. She must have ”felt” my continued glances at her. So, what does she think of me? I wondered. As I explored that question, later, I decided to write this poem in HER voice, not my own. What she perceived, I intuited, was my intrusion on her enjoyment of that all-too-short moment in the cool of the reading room.

***

A LITTLE TIME-BOUND SPACE

What you wrote from afar
is in my pocket
and will become part
of the portfolio
depicting those early days
spent without ever a thought
of death or diminishment.

I stand still an instant
and think what I have done
to hold on to the arsenal I built
of much more than illusions,
an arsenal of deeds,
many recognizable as honest,
hundreds involving you.
Only a few choices
have stood for a mistake.

In this little time-bound space
it is foolish to be content
with less than the rewarding completion
of an act performed
without haste
like the writing of a letter
in the moonlight
of this distant place.

                                 —Irene Mitchell

The story: I had in mind a friend, a dear friend, who was instrumental in exposing me to a trove of philosophical thought, especially that of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. This friend was killed in an auto accident; a winter day’s snowstorm was to blame. I often write letters to this friend who cannot, of course, read them, but who. perhaps, does receive them.

AFTER THE FUNERAL OF MAX STEINBERG

They didn’t invite me to the Prime Minister’s wartime press party —
which despite the killed and wounded and the suffering was called
a ”party” —so of course I didn’t tell him, with a severe expression as was proper
(the line of the forehead twisting like the line of defense), how the alerts catch me sprawled
on the sofa with limbs outspread terrified by every ring that might mean
that the people’s army is calling me to go into the Strip and how I lose my share
in the world to come for a pottage of running images from the battles, quickly skipping the ads
for bandages trying to locate familiar faces among the uniforms and the screams of the separating bodies
and the shards of bombshells and I leave the house only for the funerals of lone
soldiers and sometimes when they offer me documentation from hell (”Exclusive!
Watch now!”) I watch, curious, weak, openmouthed
before the screen at the party. Waiting for the rabbit.

                                                                                —Amichai Chasson
                                                                                    (23/07/2014)
                                                                                    tr. Esther Cameron

The story: The Three Weeks of the summer of 5774 threw me into a state of paralysis. The land was burning with sun and blood and in our little basement apartment in Jerusalem our oldest son was just learning to walk. I, in contrast, was going backward. Throughout the whole of ”Operation Defensive Shield” I Iay in front of the television, deepening my severe addiction to the news, waiting for the telephone call (which never came) summoning me to reserve duty. I was almost incapable of crossing the threshold of my door.
When the ground forces entered the Gaza Strip, heavy fighting ensued in the Shejaiya neighborhood. An anti-tank missile was fired at an IDF armored personnel carrier. Seven soldiers from the Golani brigade met their deaths there. One of those killed was Max Steinberg o.b.m, age 24, a lone solider who was older than his comrades in the platoon, who was born and raised in an American Jewish family from Los Angeles, who loved football and Bob Marley, and who had no relatives in Israel.
Would I have left my life on the West Coast to fight in the Gaza Strip? Exchanged the Pacific Ocean for the Mediterranean? Left my language and culture, my family and friends and put on the army uniform of a country I had not grown up in? Something in Max’s face, in his story, in the questions raised by the choices he had made and the fate that ended his life, caused me and 30,000 others who had not known him to accompany his coffin on the final journey in the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.
In the course of the funeral I remembered how, when I was in the regular army, the officers had ordered us to ”become emotional on demand” at the sight of the graves on Mount Herzl — and I was unable to fulfill the order. And now I was there again, as a civilian, and could not stop sobbing. I came and wrote down the poem in a single sweep of the pen. Aside from the title it does not mention Max o.b.m. directly, but his memory and his story are at the basis of the thoughts behind the words.

***

SIX

Set up the song, and
count the beat
after
Aunt Diane and I
would talk
your dad into
letting us sign
you up for dance.

One, two, three …

Include a pinch of
make up you
always ask me for
when you grab my
pale green
Clinique
tube, and press your

four, five …

lips together

X lingers in the sound of
a kiss. You say, ”Mommy,
put lipstick on me.” I
reply, ”Not today.”
Maybe when
we sign you up
for dance, I think.

1 Dig your hands
into
your first birthday
cake.

one, two …
I buckle your
black patent
shoes.
2 Lift you up
above
the water and
sing …

three, four ...
You say,
”You’d never
lock the door
on me?”

3 ”Dance, dance,
dance. We’re going
dance, dance,” I still
sing as I lift you
above the pool.

five …
”No, and I will
never leave
you,” I say.

4 You grab your brother’s
hand
inside a cabin
in an apple orchard
where
a blue-grass band plays,
and you two laugh
and dance.

5 I put down the
chopping board and pick
you up. We spin to a
Taylor Swift song, and
sing at the top of
of our lungs.
6
Six
a birthday you never got to see.
the number of weeks, since you left.
the number of beats in song before I cry.

i guess at least
in heaven you
didn’t have to
wait
until six to sign up
for dance when
now you
tap across rainbows.

one, two, three, four,
five.
—Rebecca T. Dickinson

The story: The poem ”Six” was written on the six week anniversary of my five-year-old daughter, Corrie’s, sudden death at five-and-a-half-years-old. She suffered from an undetected tumor that took her in a period shorter than twenty-four hours. The first poem ”Six” was written with the fear of distance beginning to build from a time when my daughter was alive, and the realization she never reached the age of six.
I do not capitalize some beginnings of sentences or the pronoun ”I” because when a child dies, it goes against nature. It goes against everything we believe life to be. The lowercase letters symbolize this.

***

DON’T TOUCH

In Bubby’s house, I can’t touch
the red velvet chairs, so stiff
around the dining room table
that if I moved them, they’d break
apart and splinter in my hands

I can’t touch the basket of fruit
resting in the perfect center
of the round yellow table
in her yellow kitchen
and can only look at the bright hard grapes
that never change each time I visit

From the polished mantelpiece
children’s faces stare
from a faded photograph
Who are they?
Bubby pulls my hands away.
Nisht Anriren.

In the dining room, a long curtain
falling over the window
tempts small children to wrap
themselves round and round in lace
but I can’t touch that either

Once, when Bubby isn’t looking
I stroke the flimsy gauze
which slips away

Outside, ash-gray twisted metal pipes
are spewing black smoke,
staining the walls of the neighbor’s house

like the smudged numbers on my Bubby’s arm
just under her sleeve
I brush against
by mistake

                      —Sarale Farkas

Bubby— grandmother
Nisht anriren— don’t touch

The story: It was the summer of 2020. I sat at my dining room table writing when I glanced at our window curtains; suddenly I was six years old again, visiting my Bubby in Boro Park. Her apartment was immaculate with thick carpets, plastic covers over the couches and wooden chairs positioned perfectly around the table. As a small child, I knew almost nothing about the Holocaust, except that it was connected to the numbers on my grandmother’s arm, hidden beneath her long-sleeved blouses, and perfectly pressed suits. Once, I noticed a single black and white photograph on the mantelpiece of five girls posed in front of a brick factory.
”Who are these girls?” I asked my grandmother.
”They lived a long time ago in Hungary.” Her eyes lingered on the photograph for a moment. Then she lifted it and took it to her bedroom. I soon developed a vague sense of a mysterious past, of something dark and hidden.
For a long while, I had wanted to write about my Bubby, but was terrified to enter that shrouded world of memory. This poem is both about my grandmother’s need to keep the past covered, to maintain the facade, and about the innocent curiosity that compelled me to move aside the curtain and enter a strange and forbidden world.

***

Eight Things No One Can See

ONE

Tomorrow will be the memory
and the not remembered.
If I forget you,
it is only temporary.
You may return as a postage stamp,
or the curve of a falling leaf.
If I step on your shadow, forgive me,
r was looking at yesterday.
TWO
The afternoon sky has the appearance
Of being tired:
holding up the refugees of clouds,
feeling the sun and the wind
breathing in-and-out,
keeping space for flocks of jays
and robins.

The sky shares its endless conversation
with stones, mountains and rivers.

Lakes hold the sky of day in their palms
until the moon drops its eye
into the silence.
THREE

As the shadows of light criss-and-cross
the wall, opposite where I sitl
waterfalls appear, bits-and-pieces
of ghosts, maps without destinations.
faces that vanish before they smile or weep.

This is how time passes, changing like sand
running through fingers.

FOUR

Looking out the window, opposite where I sit,
seeing branches of trees story-telling.
a flock of birds worshipping the valley.
a whisper of dust on the road,
the wind is there,
no sound comes through the window:
I spread loneliness across the valley.

FIVE

What brings the cat to jump into my lap
when I read a poem?
She is all fur-fire,
orange and black,
feet of winter wheat.
She lies down, facing that place
where I see only a pillow
and a lamp.
The poem read. The touch of fire.
My pen tells her jumping,
staring story.

SIX

I must speak of death now
Because I may not see dandelions again
or count the number of stars
in Orion’s Belt.

This does not mean fog or drought.

This does not mean loss of memory
a touch of virus.

This means I only want you
to sit and to listen, to breathe.

SEVEN

Yes. There are many kinds of breathing:
the in-and -the-out,
the morning freshness,
the night of good bye.

Breathing is invisible, except
when your winter-breath
clouds to moisten the glass
in the door so I can write
your name before the world vanishes.

EIGHT

And if death comes unprepared for an embrace,
I will ask it to wait its turn,
I have deer to count and apples to pick.
I will offer it a chair and a glass of water
from the well.

                      — James McGrath
                          1 December 2020
                          La Cieneguilla; Santa Fe, New Mexico

The story: This is a murmur, a reflection of light and shadows as I sat still on a cold December day writing via telephone with my Santa Fe, New Mexico poet friend, Cynthia West. During the 2020-2021 virus days, I write with friends via telephone. When we write, Cynthia and I share a theme on the telephone. In this case, ”Things I cannot see.” One of us telephones the other, check in, share a recent poem, decide upon a theme, hang-up, write for 20-25 minutes, telephone, respond, share our writings and continue the process. We spend 3-4 hours in this writing practice.
”Eight Things No One Can See”, evolved as I sat looking out my window, out past photographs of my two daughters who died of cancer’ in the past three years; out across my orchard, over the field, through a flock of migrating winter birds, to the Sangre de Cristo mountains above the city.
I write to the ”you” of my memory: a child, a lover, a stranger, one merging into the other as images are formed. This may be my mythic journey.
Writing ”Eight Things No One Can See” is a brief moment in time. A book could be written about things no one can see.
The day I wrote was a lonely day, a cloudy windy sky; thinking of the refugees at the New Mexico-Mexico border, the refugee children in cages there. I was feeling the shadows falling across the wall in the room I was writing. Pumpkin, the calico cat, jumps into my lap. At 92, I think of death. There are deer in the orchard. Apples may come next fall, I always have fresh water from my well for visitors.

***

THE HARES ON JUDGMENT DAY
The hares… cannot live without coming together for play.
— Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

To the great forest came a dog.
He said the L-rd had sent him
To tell the creatures of the wild:
”Tomorrow the world is ending.

”The measure of man’s sin is full,
They’ve made His existence a burden.
Prepare yourselves as best you can —
At noontide falls the curtain.”

The lion bowed his head in thought.
He made a proclamation:
”All animals shall meet at dawn
In solemn convocation.”

Throughout the night the animals
Were moving through the wood,
Till in a central clearing wide
They all assembled stood.

As the sun rose the lion spoke:
”Who here can find a way
To turn aside G-d’s wrath?” None there
Had anything to say

Until at last the monkey piped:
”Let’s try fasting and praying
For mercy!” ”That’s what humans do —
Does it help them?” jeered the Raven.

”If I could only get a word
In private with the L-rd,
My shrewdness even on high, I ween,
Some counsel would afford.

”You, brother Eagle, to such heights,
I hear, are wont to soar.”
The eagle sighed: ”Though high I flew,
I never found the door.”

Then spoke the hare: ”It’s plain to see
That we are at wit’s end;
So we propose, in Heaven’s name,
These hours in play to spend.”

Then all the hares, both young and old,
Began their merry dance;
They well knew how to leap and bow,
To caper, hop, and prance.

The animals stood round and gazed,
Forgetting care and sorrow,
The sun climbed up and shone as bright
As on Creation’s morrow.

The good L-rd looked into the world.
The hares at play he sighted
Within the peaceful circle there —
My, but He was delighted!

Upon this play so fine and free
His eyes he could not sate.
The minutes passed, the hours passed,
The time was getting late.

The noonday hour was gone, and still
He was not tired of seeing.
”Well, well,” He said at last, ”I guess
The world can go on being.”

So hear: even if the time grows dark
And many storms beset it,
Whoever still can find a spark,
The world will not regret it.

                                         —Esther Cameron

The story: Peter Kropotkin was a Russian prince turned (peaceful) anarchist. In Mutual Aid he argues against the theory of ”survival of the fittest” as a justification for individual ruthlessness, pointing out that the species most likely to survive and evolve are those whose members help one another. The book contains many interesting anecdotes of animal life, like the one about the hares. Kropotkin is mentioned in Paul Celan’s speech ”The Meridian,” which led me to look him up.
In the 1980’s, in Jerusalem, I was close to a circle of immigrants from German-speaking countries who still spoke and wrote their native language. For this circle I wrote, in German, the original of this poem.
For a long time I despaired of translating it. But a few weeks ago someone wrote to me that while my poems were of a kind he didn’t generally like, being ideological and agenda-driven, there was a saving lightness about them. Energized by this comment, I proceeded to translate the poem into Hebrew and then into English.
The original poem was more formally perfect (the stanzas were rhymed abab) and contained the word Tierkreis, which means not only ”circle of animals” but also ”Zodiac,” which gave the thing more of a cosmic dimension. But one friend reassures me that some of the fun still comes through.
In going back to the poem I realized how much it is rooted in the ”Meridian” speech, which has been a lodestar for me over the years The meridian — a word derived from the Latin word for ”noon” — is the line that connects the points on earth where it is noon at a given time. The poem reflects Celan’s sense of an ultimatum and yet also a lightness that sometimes surprises, especially at the end of ”The Meridian.”
Translating the poem, in turn, inspired me to formulate a proposal I have been making quite seriously for years as kind of game, called ”putting the world back together.” The rules are posted at http://www.derondareview.org/geulagame.pdf. After all many inventions are made in a spirit of play…

***

BAKING A UNICORN

Don’t we all want to bake a unicorn?
To watch our ideas rise, take shape,
solidify, consolidate,
while we wait hungrily — transform
by incubation’s chemistry
into a billion-dollar company?

Don’t we all sometimes wish we had
a piece of that pie? But if so, why
one unicorn? Why not two or three
or half a dozen — why not be
the Elon Musk of unicorn-bakers,
the shakers and makers?

How to be Elon — in our dreams at night
that’s the sought-for, prayed-for angle:
how to make half-baked ideas come right,
rise to heaven, find an angel. *

                                           —Judy Koren

* A unicorn: a startup that has reached a valuation of a billion dollars without going public.
An angel: a private investor who provides the seed money to develop a startup.
The story: I have been attending a poetry course Zoomed from the UK; one of the sessions was on the importance of a title and how to choose one. The poet giving this session claimed that he always thinks of the title first, and then writes a poem to match it — the opposite of my own usual practice of first writing the poem and then choosing the title. Among his list of possible ways of generating a title was to brainstorm some wild, wacky phrases, which might not even make sense, and think about the possibilities arising from them. One of the examples he gave of such titles was ”Bake some unicorns.” Being Israeli, with family members working in high-tech, I immediately thought of the meaning of ”unicorn” in the jargon of the high-tech industry: that exceedingly rare creature, a startup which achieves a valuation of $1 billion while still remaining private. This brought to mind another hard-to-catch creature, an angel: in high-tech jargon, a private investor who supplies the initial investment for a fledgling startup. The metaphor in the title took over from there.