When I woke up this morning
from under the blue wool cover Omama made 
years back in Romania, I heard a young woman 
on the radio speak of “white pride” on a news segment
entitled “New Faces of Hate.” Of course, I couldn’t see 
the “white pride” woman’s face, but brushing my teeth 
I could hear her self-assured voice say, “The Holocaust 
is a hoax. It never happened.” I couldn’t see her face,
but I could see yours, suddenly looking at me 
from the mirror, with my own frightened eyes. Omama, 
people used to talk about you on the street. 
Somehow everyone knew the story of your youth. 
They believed you made lightning strike the German 
officer who chased after you in the rainy wheatfield 
before you, too, were taken to camp. Omama,
even after we moved to a different town, people talked 
of your escape through rows and rows of murderous guards 
and flesh-reaping barbed wires. You had lost count 
of how many nights you hid in frozen forests, 
but the neighbors knew of your frostbitten feet 
and the weeks it took to walk barefoot over miles 
of snowy tundra in the company of stray dogs, 
with only dry leaves and muckworms to eat, 
and the maddening wind to pray to; Transnistria
farther behind with each blood-blackened step 
toward where you thought your village still stood.
And when you found only a named emptiness 
on a war-ravaged map, you took to rebuilding 
your parents’ house with your bare hands, and lived 
among ghosts until whatever was left 
to come home from the war did come. Omama,
people talked about you in the streets; awed, 
they spoke of you as if you were bewitched, 
and every rainy day I complained that no kid 
wanted to play with me for fear I, too, 
would bring a lightning bolt to strike, 
even on a playful chase. And you, 
quilting the silk face of a wool comforter,
looked askance into the light, licked the end 
of a blue thread to better aim it through the eye 
of the needle, and said, “Don’t you worry, my sweetheart, 
in a few years’ time, they’ll forget.”