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EmailLegacy, a poem: Names and Stories
Martin Herskovitz
Israel
The acid that was my parents has left
me with the memory of the pain,
angry at the hurt,
and lifetired
But it has etched upon my soul,
beneath the sadness and the pain,
vistas of sensitivity
that I was borne to reveal
yet fear.
Names and Stories
Martin Herskovitz
Israel
Some of us have only names
Names are good for reading at memorial services
and putting on bronze plaques in the synagogue
next to a flickering bulb
which is almost as good as mourning
Some of us have stories without names.
Names have been removed from the story like fangs
so that it can no longer hurt the storyteller.
So I am destined to tell the story over and over again
unsatisfied
Sometimes I feel like putting the names in column A
and the stories column B
like the test we took in grade school
1. George Washington and
c. first President of the United States
draw a line between the story and the name
and thus giving
each story has a name and each name a story.
And on Yom HaShoah I can feel I am mourning a real person
not just a name without a past
or a story without an address.
And I can hope that the tears fall more freely
But if I match imperfectly
I have mourned a fiction
a phantom who existed only in my manipulations
and I have wasted the day
or do the dead know how to take the tears
from the page on which they have fallen
and carry them in cupped palms
to their proper page