June 2021
Bio Note: I live with my archivist husband in Toronto, Canada. I’m a poet and an entrepreneur, which two ports offer me frustration and balance. Born abroad (Poland), I retain a sense of otherness. I gaze at many things including human rights, relationships, art, and, yes, coffee. I’m a publishing late bloomer. My poems have appeared in several venues including Split This Rock, Canadian Jewish News, and Visual Verse.
Sharing Sand, 1920
The photograph says Warsaw, 1920.
You and your friends step softly onto
the public beach on the Vistula River
as if breaking into a private home,
a private country. How hard to be
invisible as Yiddish songbirds—
the inflections, origins, and habits
so scorned by other Polish species.
Then you forget, and claim your territory,
sand kingdom of the new Jewish girl
and boy. Unafraid, you race with gulls,
sing above the waves, and trace dreams
on newly unwrapped souls. You ignore
the stares of haters thinking maybe today
life begins by sharing god in waves and sand.
The hours fill your hands with hope.
Circling forward and back, I touch you,
Grandmother,
blown apart,
the rubble moans—
your spirit holds
Blossom
You fell on sweetened ground
beside torn ancestor branches.
I search the world’s orchards for you—
a trace, a notion of tenderness,
did you have dark hair or light.
The apple tree remembers
your voice, and the prayers uttered
in the old wooden synagogue
that stood for centuries
until destroyed by haters.
The tree calls for the orphans
to return, to recreate the space,
not from the original,
but from messages
left by the dead.
Grandmother, you float inside
the replica, under the timber
roof, 25 tons of civilization
that we code furiously
into the made up sky,
to save the story
that sickens me
to complete
to the end,
I know you will not be there.
Love comes from void, love fills
the void at breaking points as ashes
change to images; and minds
are cut, spliced into a world reimagined
to see me through.
©2021 Anita Lerek
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