My election poem

My election poem

I think this is the first poem I've written about you

Which is surprising because you breathed poetry into me

from the moment I reluctantly came into this world

Out of your body

After they'd given you drugs to induce my birth

Because your water had broken

But for two weeks still I didn't come

And you always told me

That I clearly didn't wanted to come out

And even as a small child

That made sense to me

Because it's always been obvious to me that

No one would wish to be here if they had a choice.

When I was five or six years old

I won a citywide poetry prize for little kids

I remember being somewhere with other child poets from around the city and having pictures taken and reading my poem out loud

it was about a flower whose petals hung over the deep blue sea

But that's not what this poem is about

This poem is about how you told me

That evil never wins

Even Hitler was eventually defeated, you said.

Evil never lasts forever.

This was about 40 years before I was to find out

Exactly which of your father's family died in Poland in the 1940's

His sister and her husband and baby were rounded up in a church in their town in Poland/Austria-Hungary

Along with all the other Jews

And shot to death

She was my great aunt

Your father had a brother too who stayed behind and didn't go to Palestine or the United States

And he too was killed along with his wife

He was my great uncle

I learned about this sitting in your first cousin Yehuda's kitchen in Jerusalem

He was the son of one of your father's brothers

The son of my great uncle

I learned the names of the murdered

I saw their photographs

Yehuda died earlier this year in Jerusalem

But I couldn't go see him before he died because

Nitanyahu was too busy killing Gazans

And my girlfriend was worried for my safety

Yehuda's children and grandchildren

Are my settler colonialist relatives in Israel

Just like settler colonialist me

Descended from the one brother who escaped from Poland/Austria-Hungary

And went to the USA instead of Palestine

Breaking his brothers hearts

Because he was the favorite.

I look just like him.

My family are ghosts

I shouldn't be here

I shouldn't even exist

Odds were always against

This 3/4 Jewish girl being conceived and born

Maybe that's why I never wanted to be here

I knew they've been wanting to kill people like me for millenia

The women

The witches

The queers

The Jews

The intellectuals

The lovers

The fighters

The peacemakers

The socialists

I woke up last Wednesday morning

And found out that the worst thing had happened

And I felt something in my body

That I have only felt once before in my entire life

The night you died

When I was fifteen years old

In the middle of the night

The phone rang

And I immediately knew you were dead

And your mother

My grandmother

Picked up the phone

And then came into my bedroom there in The Bronx and said

Mommy's gone

We rode to Mt Sinai

(The hospital not the actual mountain

Although I will go there too someday)

And rode up the elevators

The ones that automatically stop at every floor on shabbat

And I saw your dead body lying on the hospital bed

Taken from me by a wolf named Lupus

And I knew then and there

That there really is something called a soul

Because what was lying there wasn't my mother

But that's a different poem

For another time

The next day

I woke up in my bedroom at noon

And opened my eyes

And remembered you were dead

And felt something like a huge boulder inside me

And a literal sinking feeling

Like falling slowly and sickeningly

to the bottom of a dank lake

Because the worst thing imaginable had happened

And now I'd have to spend the rest of my life without you

I never even wanted to be here in the first place

That's exactly how I felt

When I woke up last Wednesday

When I knew

This is really happening

And nothing is ever going to be the same

I hope you were right Mom

I hope evil doesn't last forever

It certainly seems to come back to visit often

And stays way too long

Every day now I look in the mirror and see the ghosts of my relatives standing behind me

And I know I truly am

my ancestors wildest dreams

And I vow to survive

If only for them

Because I never even wanted to be here

In the first place