Sample Poems by Judith Harway

Before the Pogrom

Early spring.
A dark room lit
by candles. Children
on the floor before
a smoky hearth,
toes of their shoes
cut off for growing.
Smells of soup
and cabbage,
damp socks hung
to dry. Straw mattresses
piled high with winter
quilts. Outside, a shawl
of rain drawn over
evening’s face. Flocks
of goats lie huddled
on the leaky sod
of rooftops, handcarts
turning home
down muddy lanes.
A gathering of relatives
who stare into
the slow shutter of history,
afraid to move.

At Pesach
the Haggadah tells us
of a time of bondage,
of the flight
of the Israelites from Egypt
into the wilderness
of freedom. Plagues
rained on the land.
The hand of the Almighty
smote even babies
dead. This is the way
I understand the day
my grandmother’s family
left Meskaporichi:
there never was a choice:
A journey starts
when it is time to go.

Free ...
—Solomon, sailing into New York Harbor

as, to court the obvious, a bird
one of the raucous swirl
diving for offal in the steamship’s wake

as young men doff their hats and crush
against the rail, stunned by the engines’
lurch towards silence, a dull humming

after nineteen days of roar; or free
as sunlight, pale and hesitant, an aura
petaling the Statue on her island,

bigger than imagining. A free ride
yours, across the North Atlantic
hiding first in folds of darkness

down below then slowly learning
that a man can be so quiet
no one notices the absence of his name

upon the manifest. Free as the bread
of strangers, weevily potatoes; free
as tears, as prayers that praise God freely

though you ask him nothing.
“Land of the Free,” a crust of island
rises to meet the ship like certainty

you’ve nothing left to lose, you’re free
to take your chances, for good or ill, in this
the only world I’ve ever known.

Tending the Past
— for Chaie

Wrap your feet in rags. Come stravaging
home down a lane between potato fields
as daylight waters down to dusk
and hearthstones stir with fire. Take off

your shawl. Bend to your stitchery
by candlelight, pretending not to laugh
at your brothers singing Etel Betel’s tochter
und Chaim Yankel’s zohn. Unpin your hair

and brush it to your waist at bedtime.
It is better not remembering
some names, some times: just drop them
like a glove, their loss unnoted

in the mystery of how this world rolls
over us. Rolled in the same old quilt
wake up a million miles away
from Meskaporichi. Though home

is all you see, even with closed eyes,
bend to your stitchery until the whistle sounds
then shuffle out into grey streets
where lamps already glow. Walk slowly

in your flowered shawl and listen
past the cartwheels’ clatter, shouts and horns,
the streetcars’ racket down the Bowery
for a voice as gentle as your father’s was

then take a man from home and love him well.
Take his name, although its syllables pile up
like fallen chimney stones. Brush out your hair
and sow the rugs of your apartment

with hairpins and tears. Wrap your son in songs
you carried from the shtetl, feeding him
on things kept to yourself
no one can make you tell.