I was lucky, none of my family
were murdered in the Shoah;
my parents never mourned relatives
nor sighed over anyone left behind,
except a cousin distant as a Polish shtetl
who lived in London’s Whitechapel,
famous for another crazed killer.
My mother asked me to visit her—
though I never found the time—
during my hippie summer abroad.
My friend Matthew, alas, lost
over forty members of his family
to the bullets, the gas; his parents
hid in the barns of kind or unaware strangers,
until the mad dogs were put down.
Then there’s the poor woman
on the radio this morning. A Denver poet:
eleven family members slaughtered
by Assad’s bombs and poison gas.
I never caught her name, but she said
Softly as a child’s summer blanket,
that her aunt—lifted gently as bone china
from the bomber rubble—lived
for a few minutes. Her aunt’s name,
when translated into insufficient English:
“Peace.”
So lovely a name, so little of it, lately.
Robert Cooperman’s latest collection is Draft Board Blues (FutureCycle Press). Forthcoming is Their Wars (Aldrich Press). Cooperman’s work has appeared in The Sewanee Review.
Photo Credit: Beth Cooperman