There are many sections in this book, which revolve around
each other and talk to each other
though they are contained units.
The Spring Crickets is one of them.
Another one of those is a group of poems
that meditate on all the different meanings of the word
ghetto throughout the ages, starting from its first known
appearance in a document describing how
the Jews in Venice in the 16th century
were to be placed in the get, which was a word for slag,
it was a word for where they dumped
or the residue of the factories, the foundries.
And so with that first pushing off of a group of people
onto a land or circumscribing them,
that's where the word began.
I'm going to read to you a few of those poems--
I think three of them.
Of course, one of the thing that we think of--
two things that we think of when we think of the word ghetto
are our own, the ones we have so creatively created
in this country, but also there are
ghettos of the spirit and the soul and all of that.
One of the more horrific consequences of that,
of course, is World War II and the concentration camps,
and one of the most ingenious and therefore
horrifying manifestations of a concentration camp
was the one at the Theresienstadt or Theresien.
This one was ingenious because they modeled it
as-- it was supposed to be the model concentration camp.
It was one that could be flipped in an instant
to look like everything was going OK.
They tended to put the composers, the artists,
the writers, the musicians, all in this concentration camp.
And whenever the Red Cross came through,
they would quickly give them fresh clothes and instruments
and have them march, do a cheerful parade
so that the Red Cross could think everything is going OK.
This poem is spoken in the voice of a survivor of Theresienstadt
by the name of Alice, or Aliza, Herz-Sommer,
and she did survive.
She was a pianist.
Transit.
This is the house that music built.
Each note a fingertip's purchase,
rung upon rung laddering across the unspeakable world.
As for those other shrill facades rigged-for-a-day
porticos, composed to soothe regiments of eyes,
guilt-reddened, lining the parade route, horn flash,
woodwind wail, well, let them cheer.
I won't speak judgment on the black water passing for coffee,
white water for soup.
We supped instead each night on Chopin,
hummed our grief soaked lullabies to the rapture
rippling through.
Let it be said while in the midst of horror,
we fed on beauty, and that, my love, is what sustained us.