posted by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selkie at 07:14pm on 27/01/2005
selkie at 07:14pm on 27/01/2005...And it's gone.
I was at the Holocaust Memorial Museum today.
I wondered how those people felt, all those years ago, when the ground changed under their feet.
A world of poetry. Singing. Jazz clubs and dancing. A world of kisses and babies and shared meals and soccer balls. A world with a language that had no bounds. A world of best clothes and home-knitted mittens. The world you live in when you safely lock your door behind you in the morning, knowing that you will come home and warm up again and there will be food to eat and a bed that belongs to you, that your beloved and your books will be there. There was a world just like the one you own and disregard, knowing that what you work for and bruise your muscles for and nick the skin of your hands for and dirty your nails for is safe.
That world was washed away by ten years' rain and ground down into the ceaseless gray mud of Poland.
It's gone.
There's no getting it back.
Un di malekhem veynt.
I was at the Holocaust Memorial Museum today.
I wondered how those people felt, all those years ago, when the ground changed under their feet.
A world of poetry. Singing. Jazz clubs and dancing. A world of kisses and babies and shared meals and soccer balls. A world with a language that had no bounds. A world of best clothes and home-knitted mittens. The world you live in when you safely lock your door behind you in the morning, knowing that you will come home and warm up again and there will be food to eat and a bed that belongs to you, that your beloved and your books will be there. There was a world just like the one you own and disregard, knowing that what you work for and bruise your muscles for and nick the skin of your hands for and dirty your nails for is safe.
That world was washed away by ten years' rain and ground down into the ceaseless gray mud of Poland.
It's gone.
There's no getting it back.
Un di malekhem veynt.
(no subject)
And the bones rise up and walk again,
the ghetto streets catcall with footsteps
and the violin’s sinewy uplilt and catch,
played for no pennies in a corner of dust.
There are ghosts under the cherry trees,
down where the birch leaves blow gold
over the river; turning phantom pages
in a library of water-stains and cracked
bindings. Here the dead are restrung,
retuned, to play of themselves at a pitch
of remembrance—down the years,
and the years are singing with them.