A CHILD IN A WAR


On the last night of Spring
They freeze in your arms like flowers
At the big thunderclap noise
Sensing panic in your chest
As if the sky were a friend
Who had suddenly slapped them
In the face
They cry as chemical warheads fall
They are not heroes
And do not like air raid sirens
To interrupt their sleep
They try to wriggle free of gas masks
If blessed to have one (just moments ago
They toddled in sunshine...)
A child in a war is a teacup in the path
Of a stolen car
Your heart borne in your arms
Through a burning house
The choice to jump six floors
Or die in the flames
The last still completely
Trusting set of eyes
Seeking yours
In a world gone blind

Who Are We?

Into the past
I go like a stranger
to discover why at night
I lay alone as a child
waiting for the front door
to slam, my father gone
to night-shift work,
and my mother, Marie, to enter,
unable to sleep, and tell me
tales of childhood
war, pursued by those
who, as she spoke,
seemed to enter the room,
Gestapo men in leather coats
who ordered me to pack
and descend to a waiting truck,
for I am still going to Auschwitz
though a grown man in 1998
I am still boarding the freight,
crushed against numbed, frightened
Jews and Gypsies and Russian
soldiers and homosexuals
crossing frontiers to be gassed

I am her, in my heart,
though I am six feet two
and two hundred and ten pounds
and have played college football
and served as a soldier
and have scars from fights
with knives and jagged
bottles smashed on bars

I am still her, little girl,
hiding in chicken coops
and forests, asleep on dynamite
among partisans
I am still her, brushing teeth
with ashes
from the ruins of nations
gutted in war

I am still her brown eyes
and black hair of persecution
foraging scraps of thistle soup,
a star-shaped patch
sewn to my shirt

I am still my mother
every day in the streets
of New York or San Francisco,
the chimney skies glow and swirl
with soot like night above
a crematorium, or the Bronx
incinerator chute where I
threw out trash in a brick
darkness shooting sparks

I am still her in the streets
of Berkeley, walking among
sparechangers, dyed-hair punkers,
gays in stud leather, Blacks,
Mexicans and Asians

I am still her rounded up
among poets and thieves
and politically incorrect
social deviants
on sun-drenched sidewalks
in the Mission and the Haight,
Greenwich Village, the Lower
East Side, or anywhere the weird
congregate in tolerance

And every day in this age
of intolerance,
in a mental ghetto
affirmed by the homeless,
I pass the dying
with the loud ring of my boots,
ashamed to think that perhaps
my heels are the last thing
they heard
Every day I am a
survivor of AIDS and poverty

Every day I sit in cafes
watching tattoos turn to numbers
and I grow angry
I want America back
I want America to be
the home I never had

And you, who are you
if you hear my voice?
Who are you, stranger
if you read these words?

Who are we
who stand threatened
in these times of darkness?
Who are we, condemned to die,
who do not know ourselves
at all?

MONDAY AFTERNOON IN HAIGHT ASHBURY

You're in a sidewalk cafe
in Haight Ashbury, San Francisco
but unlike New York
your coffee cup isn't bussed
the minute you've drained it

They let you sit from morning
to night, undisturbed

Your cup refills
at the pace of your thirst

You can bag a big table
for yourself and sprawl

You can write poems
a single line in a day
or five pages
in one hour

You can read free alternative newspapers
go out back to the garden
to bake in the sun
or stare out the window
at the endless procession
of slackers

Or you can stare
at your hands
as you're doing now
thinking of the daughter
whom broken marriage
led you to abandon

She lives abroad
with her mother

How, you wonder
without the bucks to send
a gift six thousand
miles away, will you fill
the void you've left
in her?

Or, you can take out
her picture, study it,
the one of her in profile
staring sadly through a window,

imagine that she is wondering
where you are
or you can visualize her waking
startled at night crying:
"Daddy!" But, you're not there

You're in Haight Ashbury,
in your thirties, recovering
from alcoholism, writing poems

You are like so many New Yorkers
who ran aground
in bars on bad marriage
hard labor, mindless consumerism

You made one last ditch geographic
to California to remake yourself
like a sixties movie hero
of mid-life crisis --

but it's the nineties so
you're dressed in black motorcycle
gear, not headband and sandals

and Tracey Chapman is teasing
tears from your eyes

When your forty
she'll be ten


and when you're fifty
she'll be twenty
and if you can live to sixty
with your booze-damaged
guts there'll be a reunion,
gifts, letters, phone calls,
sure, and even a book or two
dedicated to her

and maybe you'll
have dropped in one weekend and meeting
in the kitchen over a midnight glass
of milk, she'll tell you
that nothing you do or say makes it better
"You were gone," she'll say "I needed you then
I feel so empty"

You miss her cries of
glee, others reassure
her fears

there are times
when none but you
can help

but you do not hold her
you cannot hold her now
you will not soon fill your arms
with her softness, her blondness
her blue eyes, her face like yours

It is Monday afternoon
in Haight Ashbury
you are alone
and you say her name aloud

Bus

At the gateway
to America
Greyhound strikers
shrieked:
"You won't
get out!"

Ninety bucks
to cross the
land by bus

For this, embarked,
anonymous. neither
lonely or glad,

a young man
with family
stared at his
ticket, afraid

and an old aunt
stooped to her
bags as a skinhead
cursed her back

and a punk with a pierced nose
sighed: " this country's
fucked"

and beside me
an ex-con, patting
his hair, snapped:
"Man, I done my time!
I'm going home"

We boarded like
souls on Charon's bark

As the road
stroked by wheels
removed its dress,

one by one
we laid our tired
heads on breasts
of trembling
glass

But somewhere
in Pennsylvania
I woke,
my face a gun

The Saddest Man On Earth

The saddest man on earth...

Ignored how the rain felt
as he left home
for the last time

Wore down
his boot heels
searching for the woman
of his dreams,
but never understood
that life is a woman

Lived in a town
where sadness was illegal
and where grinning
cops ticketed his face
so often
that he lost his license
to cry

The Saddest man
on earth
tuned guitars
but couldn't play them,
cheated the IRS
of his own refund,
fathered a child
who thought she saw
him in perfect strangers
yet didn't recognize
him face to face

I met him once
in a bar
toasting the mirror
with his stare

He had come
south to start
life over

He was a
Mozart of silence

Alan Kaufman