WEBVTT

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In the late '80s, some years
after I did Poland/1931,

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we went to Poland
for the first time.

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And some part of
it was devastating,

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the visits to Auschwitz
and to Treblinka,

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and particularly where part of
my family had been murdered,

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so I did a series of poems.

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Poland/1931 was the
imagination of the mind.

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Never been in Poland.

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When I started writing it, I
didn't know much about Poland,

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but there are ways
of finding out.

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The new book was
called Khurbn, which

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is the word that, in my
family, we used during the war

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to talk about what was
happening in Europe.

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And people very well knew what
was happening in Europe then.

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Khurbn, a word for
disaster, going back

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to destruction of this
temple or that temple.

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"In the dark word 'khurbn,'
all their lights went out.

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Their words were
silences, memories,

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drifting along the horse
roads onto Malkiner Street.

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A disaster in the mother's
tongue, her words emptied

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by speaking, returning
to a single word,

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to the child word, spoken,
red-eyed on the frozen pond

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was how they spoke it.

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How I would take it from
your voice and cradle it.

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That ancient and dark word.

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Those who spoke it in the old
days now held their tongues."

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Dos Oysleydikn.

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The Emptying.

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"At Honey Street in
Ostrowa, family town.

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At Honey Street in Ostrowa,
where did the honey people go?

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Empty, empty, Miodowa, empty.

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Empty bakery and
empty road to Warsaw.

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Yellow wooden houses and houses
plastered up with stucco.

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The shadow of an
empty name still

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on their door as
Shaddai and shadow

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shattering the mother tongue.

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The mother's tongue
but empty, the way

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the streets are
empty where we walk

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pushing past crowds of children,
old women airing themselves

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outside the City Hall.

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Old farmers riding empty carts
down empty roads who don't

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dispel but make an emptiness.

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A taste of empty
honey, empty rolls

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you push your fingers through.

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Empty sorrel soup dribbling
from their empty mouths

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defining some other
Poland lost to us

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the way the moon is lost to us.

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Sorrel in gardens, mother
of God at roadsides.

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In the reflection
of the empty trains,

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only the cattle
bellow in like Jews.

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The dew-eyed wanderer
is still present.

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Still the flies
cover their eyelids.

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The trains drive
eastward, falling down

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a hole, a Holocaust,
of empty houses

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and empty ladders leaning
against haystacks no

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one climbs.

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Empty Ostrowa and
empty Ostrolenka.

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Old houses empty in
the woods near Wyzkow.

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Dachas the peasants would rent
to you and sleep in stables.

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The Bialo Forest,
spreading to every side,

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retreating the closer we
come to it to claim it.

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Empty oaks and empty fir trees.

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A man in an empty ditch
who reads a book the way

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the Jews once read in
the cold Polish light.

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The fathers sat there too.

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The mothers pose
at the woods' edge.

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The road led brightly to
Treblinka and other towns.

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Beaches at Brok along the Bug.

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Marshes with cattails.

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Cows tied to trees past
which their ghosts walk.

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Their ghosts refuse to walk.

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Tomorrow, in empty
fields of Poland

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still cold against their feet.

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An empty pump, black water drips
from, will form a hill of ice.

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The porters will dissolve
with burning sticks.

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They will find the babe's
face at the bottom,

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invisible and frozen,
imprinted in the rock."

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