(Hold On) My People

In my blue eyes
I do not believe in my people
Unless my people
Are the same abject
Subjects of dispossession
The same lambs
Walking to slaughter
Surrounded by the gallows of martyrs
As the ones you call your own

In my hands I do not hold
The bones of my ancestry
Unless my ancestors
Are the same ones who
Climbed numbly
Out of Ghetto caskets
The same caskets now used
By people I no longer recognize
The ones I call my own

I feel alone writing in this poem
Until I hear the lyrics of dead brothers
Uplifted! The bandied Yiddish spirit!
Branded like a number and seared into me like the vision of
The Jew in my father’s courtyard playing a broken violin
While ships set sail for Palestine
The hair of Auschwitz
Falls upon the rust of Majdanek
The meekness of Galut is shed over and over
Like skins of the python

Because in Warsaw I see The Avenues
Huey and Marek and the crickets dancing
The streets aflame and the boiler rooms below
Waiting for the fire next time