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Best Poems Written by Anita Lerek

Below are the all-time best Anita Lerek poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Anita Lerek Poem

The Seconds

[Excerpts]

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

Details | Anita Lerek Poem

Aging Sequence Poem Three

How will I be in 10 years,
the fir tree asks the maple,
the calf asks the cow,
the baby splutters out


I need to know before they publish
the writs. I need to know 
before my head is presented
on a platter to Salome 


Who will follow me?
I need to burn my words
onto the lips of the living

Sort of words
before they wither away


I need to keep talking 
to John Donne,
Shakespeare, TS Eliot,
to settle into Rothko’s rectangles
before I am colour blind. 
I need to keep talking 
to the grassy spirits

With me all day long
before my tongue fails


My arms hurt from clutching you,
heavy bearers of consciousness
and beyond. The book age
is slowly exterminating

Not burning,
simply not being born


How much time remains
for me to hold you,
dine with you,
lick your words,
sort of words 
while I still can see them

Last meal,
mine or yours?


I see the chamber emptying
as I forget words and locations. 
I need to know how much 
time remains

before the boxing up,
the clearing out before I say so 


I want to howl for as long as I can 
about the injustice of the finite,
the tyranny of counting
how much has passed

The impossibility of knowing
how much is left


I return to the present
to my wit and recall
and my avalanche of discourse

About babies and maples
and being one in flesh and song


I pound to all species
I am here
I am here
I am here


Salome, devil reaper,
wait before you strike,
warn me
wave a rag
send an emissary
to tell me exactly when

(c) Anita Lerek, 2018

Details | Anita Lerek Poem

Aging Sequence Number 9

I call for you 
when my stomach hurts
I call for you 
when I cannot swallow

I call for you from ghosted parts of my body
that are disturbed in the performance 
of the smallest acts of mercy

How you blew me around as browning 
wind sprinkling your seed, transporting dusty 
hells from far off wars over aspen forests
that trembled and rustled in special
attunement to your degraded touch

You knocked my mind’s flesh into blossomed 
kill. Your abuse shielded your love
that shielded your abuse under contract
to survive. Your land was not my land,
I grieved our severed skin

We were squalling poplars pushed by winds
not of our making. We smacked against 
each other, our needs like burning red leaves
dropping to the ground, forfeited. Yet now I 
know something remained at the roots 

You inhabit my hands, the brown 
spotted skin that moves so loosely 
like a wizened rubber nipple

Mother breeze,
cradle the body of my thought. 
Obliterate the point. No illusion, 
no despair. Simply stop the racing 
forward to the point of vanishing when
all I will do is mouth the gibberish tips
of submarine longings, and toddle back 
and forth calling for you

(c) Anita Lerek, 2019