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Yesterday at noon, a humid Sunday in St. Louis,
The second of June, in the year 2002
(Laying down these basics in my blue-ruled notebook
Helps me locate myself in the universe),
I humbly performed my duties as the keynote speaker
For a gathering of Holocaust survivors,
A sacred congregation
Of more than a hundred aged waifs, devastated souls,
Whose glazed eyes still looked death face to face.
And I realized how puny, inconsequential my life was
Compared with theirs, their disembodied lives,
Those people with the unpronounceable last names
Redolent of peasantry and ghetto-dweller stock
From Germany, Russia, Poland, Austria, Hungary,
How irrelevant the poems I was reading to them were,
Poems I'd invented with empathy and compassion,
Poems about those who died or outlasted the Shoah,
Poems of showers, furnaces, killing squads,
Poems depicting an entire panoply of disfranchised spirits,
Ghosts wrested from parents,
Bereft of wife and children, possessions, dreams.
And as I read my impassioned poems to them,
I could see from the vantage of my podium,
From the vantage of my insularity,
From the vantage of half a century,
That those whom the angel of death had passed over
Were not listening to my verse,
Or, if they were, that my words were inaccessible,
Lost in the whirlwind of sixty years ago -
When they experienced the German scourge firsthand,
A brand of anti-Semitism so heinous
That no known correlative for such race hatred and rage
Has ever surfaced in the universe.
And so, I recited to them the pathetic poetic stories
Of my vivid invention, hoping to let them know
I was paying tribute to their survivor lives,
That I care about their tragedies, torments,
And wish I could right the wrongs of the Endlösung,
Soothe the lamentations of six million Jews
Sacrificed to the malevolent disease
Whose curse still plagues us all.
And I read my metaphors, my recreations,
My desperate approximations of the victimized psyche,
Hoping to strike a common chord in those survivors,
Gathered at a luncheon in their honor,
But nothing of substance changed fate one iota.
I, a poet born in 1941,
Too late to bear witness,
Looked out over my audience,
Looked into their eyes, and wept inside,
Helpless to rectify the sadness they've had to endure
Since the time of the Third Reich,
Wondering if I had any right to be there,
Write about their plight, speak for them at all.
Yesterday, I tried to be of some use to those souls.
Tonight, a day after some praised me
For the humanity of my verse, the depth of my vision,
I reflect on what I read, my Holocaust poems,
And I cry into my being's hollow core,
Wondering what more I can do or say,
So battered were these survivors,
And knowing that not a word I had to say to them
Could possibly matter.
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