"Accident."
This poem has a thug in it from history, a Nazi thug.
Also refers to a couple of rituals,
one that happens at the end of a Jewish wedding,
there's the smashing of glass which always frightened me
when I was very young, and now frightens me now
that I'm very old.
I don't understand why it's done.
Some of you may experience this firsthand,
it's really quite something.
And then, of course, on a whole other serious level,
the smashing of glass that was a night
called Crystal Night in 1938 in Germany and in Austria,
when among other things, about a thousand synagogues' windows
were smashed.
But this begins in my own kitchen.
"Accident."
"During the ritual of dishes, I cut my trigger finger
breaking last night's crystal.
Needing stitches like I dreamt I would,
as an intruder stomping the glass
at a Jewish wedding between the living and the dead,
as between one day and another.
Darkness crashes down.
Goebbels in disgrace over an affair with a Czech actress
deigns to instruct police not to interfere with rioters smashing
windows of shops and synagogues.
Goebbels, the beetle grub, eats voraciously
before climbing into his armored car.
The bark beetle scrapes the inside of a pine,
until the whole forest is ravaged.
I have no right to claim our people's nightmare familiarity
with victims hiding in villages along a frontier.
But I beg that if so much as one person is made to feel shame,
with a mark passed off as innocent as lipstick smeared
on a tumbler in a bar, it is in fact a branding
incapable of being expunged.
Even in ignorance, one must know the difference,
because if so much as one is shattered by a remark, hurled
like a rock through a window, all of us
have blood on our hands."