Into the past I go like a stranger to discover why at night I lay alone as a child waiting for the front door to slam, my father gone to night-shift work, and my mother, Marie, to enter, unable to sleep, and tell me tales of childhood war, pursued by those who, as she spoke, seemed to enter the room, Gestapo men in leather coats who ordered me to pack and descend to a waiting truck, for I am still going to Auschwitz though a grown man in 1998 I am still boarding the freight, crushed against numbed, frightened Jews and Gypsies and Russian soldiers and homosexuals crossing frontiers to be gassed I am her, in my heart, though I am six feet two and two hundred and ten pounds and have played college football and served as a soldier and have scars from fights with knives and jagged bottles smashed on bars I am still her, little girl, hiding in chicken coops and forests, asleep on dynamite among partisans I am still her, brushing teeth with ashes from the ruins of nations gutted in war I am still her brown eyes and black hair of persecution foraging scraps of thistle soup, a star-shaped patch sewn to my shirt I am still my mother every day in the streets of New York or San Francisco, the chimney skies glow and swirl with soot like night above a crematorium, or the Bronx incinerator chute where I threw out trash in a brick darkness shooting sparks I am still her in the streets of Berkeley, walking among sparechangers, dyed-hair punkers, gays in stud leather, Blacks, Mexicans and Asians I am still her rounded up among poets and thieves and politically incorrect social deviants on sun-drenched sidewalks in the Mission and the Haight, Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, or anywhere the weird congregate in tolerance And every day in this age of intolerance, in a mental ghetto affirmed by the homeless, I pass the dying with the loud ring of my boots, ashamed to think that perhaps my heels are the last thing they heard Every day I am a survivor of AIDS and poverty Every day I sit in cafes watching tattoos turn to numbers and I grow angry I want America back I want America to be the home I never had And you, who are you if you hear my voice? Who are you, stranger if you read these words? Who are we who stand threatened in these times of darkness? Who are we, condemned to die, who do not know ourselves at all?
You can find this poem in — The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry
“And you, who are you
if you hear my voice?
Who are you, stranger
if you read these words?
Who are we
who stand threatened
in these times of darkness?
Who are we, condemned to die,
who do not know ourselves
at all?”
I hear your voice calling to us from the dead.
The enmeshment that runs through the DNA of multigenerational trauma, suffering, and running. It was born into our bellies and chests.
Who am I? I am the seventh generation of suffering that says it is going to stop here. The fear of the pogroms born into the hard root of my heart, the tattoo on my arm that falls like a flag for my brother, my sister, my parents, yours.
I am what exodus is. Daring to leave the narrow space and enter the vast uncertainty of consciousness, when none of us know who we are because we are everything and nothing.
Brilliant poem. I could truly feel your mother with every word