Healing Via Poetry

@2genpoet ... hey there! I am very interested in this discussion, group, forum, whatever it's called! The time that was offered for the other one, I think it was the first one... was basically horrible for me :( I think you did ask for feedback on what time to hold the meeting, right? ~Platy

Sounds a discussion topic well good

But before I break into a poetic flood

I'll pull back up my hood

And stay in my corner stood

Have a nice discussion though all who do rhymically convene

Find words and emotions to yourself and others heal in a way rarely before seen!

@2genpoet.. Thank you for the tag.

I am excited! Woot woot! <3 let's learn from each other, shall we? :)

Poetry for healing!!! :)

@2genpoet, thank you for the info. I will try my best to join you. I just read some of the pages in the link you provided. Poetry therapy is wonderful indeed.

I want to take you on a journey of my healing via poetry. Being a Second Generation - a child of Holocaust survivors has led to few emotional and psychological problems. The book that helped ne unserstand the connection was Memorial Candles - here is alink and you can read some selctions from the book

https://books.google.co.il/books?id=zjTKAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=snippet&q=abandonment&f=false

. The book encouraged me to try to seek healing by establishing roots and creating a past. But it was so difficulty because memory was pain for my parents. This frusteation of the destruction of the past and the yearning to create a family was epressed in one of my first poems Photographs

Photographs

1.

My cousin Haim Stern returned to Serednye after the war

Took the key from the neighbor

To return shortly, a shoebox under his arm

And he strode toward the tree grove.

The bonfire in the grove burnt the photographs well

as he stood over the curling pictures, prodding them deeper into the flames

the nitrate smoke burnt his eyes.

He sat in the clearing till the embers died down, then freed, left for America

his spare set of shoes now in the shoebox.

2.

My father has put away the pictures from before the war and he can't find them.

But I think that he put away the pictures so he won't find them.

What good are those pictures, he says, they were all blurry

and in the posed pictures they all look like statues

Better we should take pictures of our wonderful grandchildren, not blurry and in color.

Let's finish the roll and in an hour we'll have new pictures. Much better

3.

I don't have any pictures of my uncles who died in Auschwitz

not that it would help much.

My Uncle Meshulam died when he was 4 years old.

I would feel pretty silly holding a picture of a four year old

and saying this is my uncle.

It is hard for me to imagine that I had a family at all.

I'm not a god that can create a family out of motes of dust.

4.

Whenever I would ask about the Holocaust my parents changed the subject saying

"You have to put the past behind if you want to go forward"

After 45 years of all sorts of directions, I am beginning to doubt their words.

At ager forty-five i begin to find whoi I am to find a past in my parents silence, to find memory within silence, to takes snippets of stories and to build a feeling of familyto realize that a grandmother and grandfather who dies 11 yrs before i was born is still my relative even if no one mentions their name. Thus begins my journey to creating a narrative from the silence

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day 2

by not remembering the pase we are doing a dissevice to those that have dies - here are poems that helped me deal with the emotion

Unknown/Unowned

If, as the Rabbis say,

Each life has a meaning,

Then each death should have its meaning too.

A tear, a shiver

A murmur

Of Blessed Memory

After a name.

Even just a glimpse of a memory

Like the flicker of a lamp.

But a death unmourned,

Unnoted

Is a cruelty that never should have been created,

It is a cruelty beyond flames,

Beyond dust.

Unmourned

It is a time of mourning in Israel
Grandparents mourn their grandchildren
And children their parents.
An entire country versed in mourning
Except for me.
Amid the mourners' wails
my grandparents hold their faces earthbound
To catch some of the tears deemed for others.
Tears they have never known for all died with them,

except a few.
And those feared to not cease crying,

So they never started..
They long to be mourned
But I who have never known their embrace, cannot.

I cry not rivulets,

but meager tears,

which can rinse no sorrow.

But I know their pain
In me their sadness has interred.
This too is a link

and it will have to suffice, as yet.

It is a time of mourning and I sit among the unmourned.

Yom Kippur

Yom Kippur Eve

I shut myself up in the bedroom and

take out the photographs

From before the Holocaust.

Neighbors and relatives

Who were probably murdered,

My mother doesnt exactly know.

Some of the names I knew and forgot,

And some I never knew

Because she stopped talking,

And the next few middle of the nights I heard her in the hallways

And the rattling of the tea kettle in the kitchen.

So I dont want to ask her again.

I just take out the pictures now,

And prop them up on my bed

To ask for their forgiveness that I havent mourned so well .

But maybe not

Because forgiveness means regret and change,

But Im only doing the best I am able

and I cant regret that.

And as far as change I dont think things will be any different next year.

But if they can forgive,

then they can also love

and know the responsibility of being loved.

So maybe they can understand,

I ask for that.

Because on Yom Kippur the High Priest

Sacrificed two goats

One for his family

And another, the scapegoat

for them,

the multitude.

There are supposed to be two

And I am but one.

the failure to mourn led to a search for mourning but you cannot mourn a shaow you need to mourn a person and what did i have of these people

maybe just a name

but even a name is not rnough for hat is living except acummulating names

Names

My mothers father was named Mordechai Kleinbart

But maybe, because he was the eldest son,

His mother called him Tateleh,

And his father probably called him Mordkhe

like my father called me.

His sister and brothers called him, perhaps, Moti

Except for the baby sister who called him Momo

Even after she grew up.

His wifes cousins at the winery may have called him Kleiny

And his children surely called him Tati

As did his wife,

Except late at night, alone in the bedroom

She would maybe call to him with Yiddish familiars

In a soft erotic lilt.

Or maybe not,

Because Mordechai Kleinbart is the single name I have

And it alone is carved into stone

and molded into bronze.

All the other names exist only in memories long interred

Or on pages yet unwritten.

sometimes the name came witha story

but mostly the stories were without names

Names and Stories

Some of us have only names.

Names are good for reading at memorial services

and putting on bronze plaques in the synagogue

next to a flickering bulb,

which is almost as good as mourning.

Some of us have stories without names.

Names have been removed from the story like fangs

so that it can no longer hurt the storyteller.

So I am destined to tell the story over and over again

Unsatisfied.

Sometimes I feel like putting the names in column A

and the stories in column B,

like the test we took in grade school

1. George Washington and

c. first President of the United States,

drawing a line between the story and the name

So every story has a name and each name a story.

And on Remembrance Day I can feel I am mourning a real person

not just a name without a past

or a story without an identity.

And I can hope that the tears fall more freely.

But if I match imperfectly

I have mourned a fiction

a phantom who existed only in my manipulations

and I have wasted the day.

Or do the dead know how to lift the tears

from the page on which they have fallen

and carry them in cupped palms

to their proper page.