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The Seconds 

[Excerpts]

 
(c) 2019, Anita Lerek
 
 
 
Section 1/4

First Generation - Before the Holocaust 

 
Lvov, Poland 1930s.  Mother, you were a Jewish girl but you were not expected to enter history. You played outside time like a star burning for trillions of years. Hands of pleasure created fire, and tossed in rags of exotic oils and sunflowers to heighten the mingling of school yard bodies barely formed. You lived inside bushes filled with chocolates, ghosts of guardians, and boys measured by swagger and expensive shoes
 
Your lives were handcuffed by words, set in the grammar of racial separation. But there was no one else, just you and your friends, beauty marooned in floodlit trance
 
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Section 3/4

The Survivors

............

You lie on the beaches. You lie in the fields. You are bits of debris, tufts of life stuck together, shadows thrusting and contracting in search of embodiment
 
So many lost, beyond mouthing. What history removes, language cannot restore.  Rather it is a burial ground, an anti-galaxy of boarded up stars. How many forms are there of nothing?
 
Ancestors cry out to you from pine trees and flowers, from buds and branches. You hear nothing. You seek out strangers. By touching them, you try to rouse a sleeping god of your lost civilization, to reach the boys, the sunflowers, the shadows begging to return
 
Your limbs touch, boxes smacking against each other, filling, releasing. You barely move. You let him have his pleasure. Then without a word, you leave, and return, to release the one valve, day after day; all others seized by horror. You never exchange names
 

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Section 4/4

The Second Generation

..........

I was of the same cloth but not the same cloth. I did not occupy the same land as you. I grieved our severed skin
 
I come closer now, hover at your borders. Mother, your elements are wearing down, motions slowing, your fragments crumbling

Stop, stop, stop the cycle
of trauma: its birth, hardening into splintered towers, falling apart and re-forming

Let me into love before you leave me, here in this final land
where love crystallizes 
into the expansive images
that cradle me 
in beds of rock,
the last images 
that I send up
to mend babel’s darkness
for trillions of years
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