Yerra Sugarman was born in Toronto and teaches writing at New York University and City College. She received the 2005 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry for her first collection, Forms of Gone, published by Sheep Meadow Press in 2002. Her poems and articles have appeared in ACM, The Nation, How2, Pleiades, Barrow Street, Verse Daily, 100 Poets Against the War, and the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. She holds degrees in visual arts from Columbia and Concordia Universities and in writing from City College.
Because
There were days the color of numbers, of runny ink
marks on the arms, the color of iris and storm,
of cattle brand. When I was small,
I thought some people come numbered.
There was the silent ticking of stars, their clear
constant trails, memories floating up from nowhere:
Gedenkst du? Remember? He was a socialist
before the war. Gey shoyn. Go on…There were stories
from the Torah, a Sabbath candelabra (the one thing saved).
Why? Because our minds are like planted fields.
Candy dishes of crystal, rose and blue, bone china,
a bad painting of the Champs Élysées (purchased with care)
the people in it just a few quick brushstrokes. Kosher
bakery cookies, tea served in glass cups, its darkness lightened
by wheels of lemon. There were the swirling rhythms
of the Bible. When you pray you should move
your lips. Why? Because God must hear
each word. You should shuckle back and forth,
sway. Why? Because the spirit of man
is a candle. There was the rush to Yizkor services
when children were hushed and filed out of the sanctuary.
Why? Because the dead are asked to intercede.
Early cherry blossoms pawed the suburban fences.
Crocuses speared through late snow where we found ghost
boot-holes, paths that made you know
someone had lived before and now you were taking
their place. The voices of my parents and their friends
hard as iron, soft as pulp. The languages
they spoke pellets of hail against a window.
I met him in the camp, in lager.
Prosze Pani, please Madam, take more cake.
Bardzo ladny. Very good.
He looked like a Pole, that’s how he survived.
Beautiful dress! To jest piekna, Pani Regina. Sheyn.
She ran from one hiding place to another. That’s why she’s so nervous.
Dziekuje bardzo. A sheyem dank. Thank you very much.
What I still don’t understand—the simultaneity:
beauty fringing horror, the everyday
lined like a coat with the fabric of the extraordinary. A glitter
of lakes, the plush of trees alongside the route of freight trains
from Drancy to Auschwitz. On Deportation Convoy 23,
there was a girl with my name, my name exactly,
just another language. Convoy, I look up
the meaning: To accompany on the way
for protection. A protecting force. There were skies
opalescent as the insides of oyster shells, clouds
like schools of newly hatched fish.
Some of the children were listed only by number. Why?
Because the infants were too young
to say their names. Why? Because there was light
reaching through the ribs of the library chairs.
Because there was light.
By Yerra Sugarman from her book Forms of Gone
Purchase at Sheep Meadow Press.