At first, I didn’t get it,
my father’s love of naming—
philodendron, angel wing, pathos—
or the ritual candlelight on Friday evenings.
My mother’s obsession with crosswords
that she easily solved in pencil.
This was the understory of our lives—
creation and caution. We were archeologists
of the unspoken. An underground ideology
my parents never thought to transmit.
What does it mean to be Jewish?
The gates of sadness never more
than a train stop away—
a six-pointed star I would slip off to gather periwinkles
on the beach, my ankles sea-stained and spectral.
Our family drove the Bourne Bridge
to the Cape, same one-lane road as every local;
but what about the prohibition on shellfish
or the faded scrawl like hieroglyphics,
a watery green on my great aunt’s arm?
What about the odd phrase under each dinnerplate:
“Made in the American Occupied Zone”
my dad brought home from the Service?
What about 600 swastikas graffitied throughout Germany
in the months just after the war?
And now, this fall at the supermarket in Jersey City
or the Pittsburgh synagogue. What of the small
blue house in my own neighborhood—
the garage door spray-painted in the rose color of “Jew”?
–
Susan Rich is an award winning poet, editor, and essayist. She is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Cloud Pharmacy and The Alchemist’s Kitchen, and co-editor of the anthology The Strangest of Theatres (Poetry Foundation, 2013). Rich has received awards from PEN USA and the Fulbright Foundation. Her fifth collection, Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Collected Poems, is forthcoming from Salmon Press. Her sixth collection, Blue Atlas, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.