By Kathy T. Winston
The windows are shattered now, broken in a firestorm of hate.
Like archeologists, we sift for shards in the dust.
Safe on distant shores, we try to piece the glass together,
to construct a window
through which to experience the everydayness of your lives,
how you lived with your family and God
day by hour and hour by minute.
We cannot make the window whole again,
Yet we glue splinter to splinter,
In hopes that through this kaleidoscope of glass we will gather glimpses,
Not of your pain—
Of your pain we already know, as fully as humans can who were not there to witness it—
but to see the good you left behind.
Through one piece of glass,
smudged lightly with dust,
a woman stands in front of a brick stove, stirring an iron pot.
She hums.
Occasionally she feeds faggots to the flames shooting out from
under a grill
that rests on the brick and supports the pot.
A baby sleeps quietly in a cradle near the stove,
The heat of the kitchen—
A good place to be in the dead of a Belarus winter.
Commotion draws our attention to
a sliver of polished glass.
Its stillness is broken by
Scrubbing and drying and shaking and doing.
Friday morning,
The challa sits in majestic warmth
on the center of the table under an embroidered cloth,
waiting for Queen Shabbes.
Young girls laugh, rub candlesticks,
wash windows and porch.
Mama and her daughters turning round and round
in the dance of pre-Shabbes cleaning.
Through a third shard of glass,
a woman knocks a hole in the ice,
preparing to wash her family’s clothes in the Shishka River.
No children in sight.
Children do not play beside their mothers in winter, on the Shishka,
even in the sunshine.
Now washing is serious work, something to be done quickly.
As the woman balances over the rushing river,
we hold our breath.
A tightrope walker with dirty laundry slung over one shoulder.
Here a wife yells at her husband
There two young lovers embrace.
In one dining room activists argue politics.
In others women darn socks
and kiss their children goodnight.
Relatives and friends we never met,
We bask in the warmth and love you gave your families,
the loved ones who were killed with you
on the 28th of Elul, 5702,
or the year before on the 17th of Av.
Do such gifts die with the giver and the receiver?
No, they still permeate the air,
and ripple through the rivers where your children bathed.
God remembers for all time,
And therefore God’s creation remembers.
Your voices will ever mingle with the waves
as they pass through David-Horodok,
Will fall with the rain in the autumn
as it reduces the town to mud.