FOR HANNAH

Oh, Hannah,

Dearest Hannah,

blessed was your fire,

stoked though

feet of eight/

darkened block/

snuffed flame

sealed your

unconscionable fate.

I inhale the soot

which marked the spot

where once your

hands held paper.

Your splintered pencil

wrote of faith and country,

love and purpose.

I choke from the

breadth of their

enmity for you.

The sediment grows thick

with apparitions

for whom vindication

has not come, as

I struggle with breaths

acidic from decades of decay.

I am reduced to travailing,

as my lungs, my heart

digest the stench

of horrors you endured.

I want to mourn for you

with peace and reverence,

but am filled with anger

that young poet so gentle

was made martyr.

They caged you, though could not constrict your spirit,

They beat you, though each hit only served to remind you were still breathing,

They raped you, yet after grown men had torn into your youthful flesh

punishing your temple for simply being Jewish,

You mustered enough strength to stand to your feet…

let your dress gape open to shame them

as you walked the camp bruised and bleeding.

But you faltered only for fleeting moments

Before again taking in hand pencil

To write of blessings and hope,

And when they knew finally

they could not break you…

They stood you without benefit of mercy,

No counsel, no marches,

No chance for reprieve

No final countdown

No media,

As you kneeled

before uniformed soldiers/

shot you like thief,

like vagrant/

young girl at war,

unable to grasp

the impact of your existence.

In those last days of

dolor and muck,

wash and ascendance,

what name did you call

but Mother, Dearest Mother,

what God acknowledged you

Daughter, Faithful Daughter/

no calvary sky darkened/

connect undone/

words not heard,

while execution

fulfilled their plan?

Who came for you,

who came for you

while your Hebrew pen

grew lonesome

for your hand,

did no one think to aide

those decedents

who now grieve

for never having read

what more you had to say?

Who failed to rescue you,

who WAS it, Hannah?

What man lacked humanity

and let your worn shoes

be stripped from

weary ankles,

after you paced in circles,

gazing upwards towards

Adonai and Mother?

Did no one come

while ashen tears

fell upon the

blemished face of man?

Who comes for us all,

when we give life for

mission, exchange

sanctuary for mortuary?

Who will rescue OUR words,

who will hear OUR pleas

for love, for peace,

what name will

WE call, but Mother,

Dearest Mother/

when the soot

fills our lungs and our

pens write no more?

Will no one come, Hannah?

Will no one come

for us as

no one

did for you?

Hannah Senesh [Szenes], (July 17, 1921 – November 7, 1944)

May your soul rest in peace.

REVELATION

Tossed myself into shards of a lullaby
I never knew the lyrics to.
Hummed the chorus
And cried for a lonesome
I could never verbalize
Yet aptly described
In expressions unseen.
Then rocked myself until
Morning came.

Found that it took drowning,
Body swept away in the undertow,
To swallow just enough
To quench my need for compassion.

Stumbled into a stack of wood
Laughed at the absurdly obvious realization
That perhaps it was just fire
I'd been lacking all along.

Wayside friends lacking names
By which to attach memories to,
But hers, I could never forget.
Neither could I my own.

Misery slept on the pillow next to my own
Interrupting tranquil dreams to remind me
Of the realities of life I ignored
Until I no longer was able to rest easy.

Prodded me until
I found the right person
While traveling the wrong path
Drank the half empty glass
And enjoyed the clarity of
The glass for its beauty
Rather than the utility
Of The Vessel.

If I weren't alive, alone
I would ask
If water always tasted this divine,
Though I know for me,
It just never did.

COLLOQUIAL TORMENTRY

Much as the argument between repetition and redundancy, If I were to make for myself a mental inventory 
Of the attributes that hold for me the most appeal 
Your characteristics would fail to meet vital criteria  

Yet, 
I feel entranced, 
as though 

you 

have put

a trance on me.  

You fill my senses with participles and pronouns 
Conjunctions of spirits, infinitive as to sound 
Verbal liquor I want to taste, willfully drink down 
Languishing on phrasal flirtations,  
A fusion of two minds, surprised to have found.  

Tone inflections ever linger, as I contemplate how it is 
I could be so enamored with simple adjectives.  
Whispering emotions between strings of font and rhetoric 
Though I try desperately to remain complacent  
I've resolved that it's an action of futility.  

As no matter how many sentences I formulate 
Instructing my heart to keep you at a distance emotionally,  
In the end,  
I still want you desperately. 

The torque of this magnetized poetry  
Has me in the grips of colloquial tormentry 

Yet I must admit,  
that your diction feels 

so

damn 

good to me.

LONESOME FOR THE TRUTH

In the aftermath hurricanes of circumstance
a poet clings to her words.
Divulging skeletons publicly seems absurd,
preferring to abnegate the hurt,
surrendering truths serves only to disconcert
so you whisper
your thoughts
to paper.

The line between craft and life
your heart never distinguished.
Your inherent impulse can not be extinguished.
Rejection of the gift a pursuit in futility,
like a wild animal kept in captivity,
you may cage it, but you can’t tame it.

So inevitably
the truth pours from your lips.
Your mind is the womb, giving birth from your hips
Of experience.

Your lyrical conceptions are born,
narrator and mother,
under the shield of vocabulary
you seek cover.
You hide in the stanzas,
finding refuge in the arms of poetic answers.

Oxygenating your soul,
expressions you can not control
it’s as natural as breathing.
Prose keeps your pulse beating.
Inhaling the future, exhaling the past,
the present martyr of verses so vast,
You’re forced to make a truce.
Because misery may love company,
but you live lonesome
for
the
truth.

WORST YET TO COME

I am slightly embarrassed to admit
That I misinterpreted his ability
to write journals of insightful poetry
To then mean that he could easily read me.
But the lines at the corners of my eyes
Were seen by him to be only a beautiful sign of aging
And no amount of lyrical lines on a page
Could ever be expressed to him in such a way
That he might then gain an understanding.

Nights of torturous questioning,
words screamed in angered supposition
As another man’s jealous accusations were hurled
Yanking me violently from my slumber
like Cyclonic winds ripping at skin
exposing the skeleton Of some imagined hidden secrets.
Denying sins I had never committed
Giving exacting accounts and details of every minute
Spent out of his presence until such time as he was satisfied
That my eyes weren’t hiding behind them
any
clandestine
meetings.

Beatings for affairs never came
with ample warning in which to escape them
And my attempts to escape from him where always thwarted
By my bodies inability to go without sleep
For that seemed to always be the time in which he captured me
Glaring down with eyes of murderous contempt
His lungs consuming stale air like the bulls charging in Pamplona
Until fists crushed bones like ice
Shattering the security found only in dreamless coma.

And for me, there came no justice
Just us
fighting endless night after another
Police gritting their teeth
inspecting fresh bruises coloring my cheek
Saying to me
“That’s what you white bitches get when you marry brothas.”
And, please, would someone tell me who the hell
Orders of protection serve to protect
To a man who worries not if newspapers
print stories about his crimes
After he’s sent home from doing state time STILL on paper

Years spent contemplating and
seduced by the plotting of his revenge.
For him, not a question of right or wrong,
but rather
just
one
more
good
opportunity.

First steps of freedom upon concrete lead him directly
Into the direction of the city
where I laid my head at night
Locks on doors in hidden buildings are no protection.
Not from a man consumed
by imagined thoughts of my indiscretions
Sensations tingling for slight seconds
before knuckles met flesh.

Only the sandman heard me confess that this time
I wish
he’d
just
kill
me,
for living on the run is slow torturous execution for the crime
Of only attempting of to protect myself.
So forgive me if even though years have passed
I still don't sleep lightly.

Nightmares of the nightmare I survived from
Still taunt me,
and the demons of my past are so haunting
That napping for half hour increments
Leave the skin around my eyes wrinkled.
Though now, the new love I’ve just discovered
Doesn’t understand that
when he pulls the covers over our heads
So as to make love to me in the safety of our bed
I just feel…
uneasy.

Though I may be insecurities about my body
I insist that we still leave the lights on
With a hidden knife close by head
And when he kisses away
the tears from my colorless cheeks
After he shaken me awake from night terrors he
Just doesn’t
Understand.
He whispers sweet, healing poetry
Naively thinking his rhymes can erase these lines
around my eyes

But what he does not know
is that while he rest there comfortably
In the bed at night sleeping
I instead like awake waiting

For the

worst

yet

to come.