You, air-driven, reft from the tuber-bitten soil that
was your portion from the torched-out village,
the Marxist study group, the Zionist cell, cafe
or Cheder, Zaddik or Freudian, straight or gay, woman or man.
O you, stripped, bared, appalled,
stretched to mere spirit, yet still physical.
Your irreplaceable knowledge, lost at the mud-slick bottom
of the world.
How you held fast with your bone-meal fingers
to yourselves, each other, and strangers.
How you touched, held up from falling,
what was already half-cadaver.
How your life-cry taunted extinction with its wild,
crude, so what?
Grief for you has rebellion at its heart.
It cannot simply mourn.
You, air-driven, reft, are yet our teachers
trying to speak to us in sleep, trying to help us wake.