Signing
The signer stands to one side
of the mayor. Her hands fly up,
first to her forehead, then to her
heart. Her fingers flutter
of heartbreak,
yet another shooting.
She conjures in me
my mother’s deaf brothers
and sisters,
she the only hearing child. When
they were little
my mother played the piano,
her siblings the audience.
She left them behind,
sailed on a ship
to America,
no man would marry her.
Before dawn
the Jews were rounded up,
stripped of their clothes, their belongings.
Five deep pits, eight meters wide,
waited,
steps carved on the edge
to ease entry.
They are signing now
from an unmarked grave,
bestowing their loving applause.
My mother knew the random
hand of mercy
and they
do not begrudge her.
Daughter
I flew to a city far
from Brooklyn where she raised me.
My mother lay in her railed bed,
wisps of hair spread
out on her pillow. I held
out my hand.
She pushed it away.
Next morning, I drove to Bojangles
for a sausage biscuit and coffee,
then back to her.
She still refused to know me,
ghost of a woman,
who fled a Russian village
by herself
and left a wrong marriage.
She swooned
when her infant was born,
the daughter
who would console her,
the daughter who now rushes
to the airport
for her flight home.
This piece is a part of the Berru Poetry Series, which supports Jewish poetry and poets on PB Daily. JBC also awards the Berru Poetry Award in memory of Ruth and Bernie Weinflash as a part of the National Jewish Book Awards. Click here to see the 2019 winner of the prize. If you’re interested in participating in the series, please check out the guidelines here.
Harriet Shenkman, Ph.D., Professor Emerita at CUNY, serves on the WNBA, NYC board and is Poet-in-Residence at The Transition Network (TTN). She won the Women’s National Book Association 2013 Annual Writing Contest in Poetry and Women Who Write 2013 International Poetry Contest. A finalist for Jewish Currents Raynes Competition, 2014, her poetry appears in national and international journals, including most recently in Comstock Review and Indolent Books. Her chapbook Teetering was published in 2014 and The Present Abandoned in 2020, Finishing Line Press. Her poetry is forthcoming in Gyroscope Review, Train River Press Anthology and Dreich Magazine. She has just completed a novel, The Camel Tamer, and hopes to find a publisher. The novel tells the harrowing journey of an innocent American teenager who finds himself in the crosshairs of the middle east conflict.