1.
They took you on a German day,
Europe still under its clouds.
You who were certainly my cousin
however man times removed,
were removed from passive neighbors,
still in unbombed houses, by night;
you were going to live and work and play
somewhere in Poland, they said.
2.
A scientist, a cook, a movie star,
a balding neurotic or my son's teacher
(he hates him)--fifty years later
up from a nightmare, I wonder,
smoke, what you would be? Black
coffee. Morning's ritual begins--Again
water comes out of my shower, not gas;
I have no right to write your eulogy.
First published in The Other Side, January-February 1994
Shortly after this poem appeared in print, I got a letter from the American poet, Samuel Menasche, whom my wife and I knew well when we lived in New York. (We had moved to Baltimore in 1980.) He informed me that he thought I did have the right to write my unknown cousin's eulogy and that he was pleased that I did. I don't know what the difficulty was--I was busy with work and family, but not that busy. I regret to say that I never wrote him back or visited him in his walkup on Varick Street, as I had done many times before. (He wrote a poem about the bathtub in his kitchen; I lived in an apartment like that in Yorkville.) I always intended to contact him as the years passed; I never did. Samuel died in 2011 at the age 84, a few years after receiving the first ever "Neglected Master's Award" from the Poetry Foundation. Samuel, the inscriptions you wrote for us in your books have faded, but Nirmala and I are still very much here! You are, too.
They took you on a German day,
Europe still under its clouds.
You who were certainly my cousin
however man times removed,
were removed from passive neighbors,
still in unbombed houses, by night;
you were going to live and work and play
somewhere in Poland, they said.
2.
A scientist, a cook, a movie star,
a balding neurotic or my son's teacher
(he hates him)--fifty years later
up from a nightmare, I wonder,
smoke, what you would be? Black
coffee. Morning's ritual begins--Again
water comes out of my shower, not gas;
I have no right to write your eulogy.
First published in The Other Side, January-February 1994
Shortly after this poem appeared in print, I got a letter from the American poet, Samuel Menasche, whom my wife and I knew well when we lived in New York. (We had moved to Baltimore in 1980.) He informed me that he thought I did have the right to write my unknown cousin's eulogy and that he was pleased that I did. I don't know what the difficulty was--I was busy with work and family, but not that busy. I regret to say that I never wrote him back or visited him in his walkup on Varick Street, as I had done many times before. (He wrote a poem about the bathtub in his kitchen; I lived in an apartment like that in Yorkville.) I always intended to contact him as the years passed; I never did. Samuel died in 2011 at the age 84, a few years after receiving the first ever "Neglected Master's Award" from the Poetry Foundation. Samuel, the inscriptions you wrote for us in your books have faded, but Nirmala and I are still very much here! You are, too.
