The later generation
by Ana Doina
“we dig a grave in the breezes”
—Paul Celan ‘Death Fugue’
My parents were stunned into a blank stare
by the numbers. Grandfather mumbled them
instead of prayers, but for me, the numbers
have the same significance as the burning
of Carthage. It was. It is what got us here.
Sorrow has little to do with numbers. No one
comprehends what is outside senses and reason –
millions of state-approved, orderly executed murders.
What hurts still, is looking at pictures –
the sensual curve of Aunt Sarah’s shoulders,
the sly seductive pose Cousin Paul takes
in all his photos, Uncle Adam’s fastidiously
manicured long hands, little Margaret’s silk dress
and shy smile – a family portrait. Pictures never
intended to become historical documents
or to survive as symbols of pain in anyone's memory.
The cousins my kids never had. The multiple ties
of a family with treasures and apple pie recipes
handed down from mother to daughter. All of it
burned, lost. What hurts is grieving for the lives
I’ve never been part of, for the stories silenced
before they could tell their first tales. Like a lunatic,
I longingly want to remember what never took place.
What I have instead are monuments, statistics,
documentaries. What I have instead are cemeteries
where the horizon is the only point of reference
among graves, graves to lay stones on. And I wonder
where could I lay a stone for those whose burial ground
is the smoke and the soot of their own flesh and blood?
And the absence of that stone hurts again.
Ana Doina is a Romanian born American writer living in New Jersey. Due to political pressures and social restrictions, she left Romania during the Ceausescu regime. Her poems and essays have been published in various literary magazines, anthologies, textbooks, and online publications. Two of her poems were nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2002 and 2004. One of her poems was awarded an honorable mention in the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Awards for Poems on the Jewish Experience contest in 2007.
About “The later generation” she writes, “I grew up after the Holocaust and during the Cold War. The destruction the wars brought to all of us is one of the themes recurring in my writings. As the inheritor of that tormented past, I am trying to explore through poetry the lament and the wisdom left behind by that history.”