Displaced Person
How did you get from there to here?
That was always the implicit question
asked of my mother’s pain and endurance—
geography a puzzle of suffering.
.
My mother, small, burdened, and tattooed,
a single tattoo that looked like the address to Hell
or Gehenna or torment—
good luck with language
in times of recalling the displacement and death —
could tell a darkly wondrous joke
and as I waited for her to translate the words
from Yiddish to English
or in my haste did the translation myself
a little too scholarly for my own little boy good
the humour was astounding
even as the tears of remembrance
followed their course
and disregard for any dictionary.
.
My mother and I never argued or debated
about the heavy hands of history
at least that’s how I translated it from the Yiddish
on one time-broken occasion
I thought maybe strong fists of time
but no, that didn’t capture it
what does,
but I was imprisoned by words
and always mixing up
captivity and escape, still do.
.
I spent a great deal of my youth
finding words for
the indefinable
inexplicable
unfathomable
there and here, fleeing, foreign,
incomprehension has that funny little evasiveness
I could go for the numbers and the literalness
I could look at a picture of the entrance
to where your toil made you free
no joke there, dark or otherwise,
until my eyes and mind turn mutinous
and insecure voices tell me
what I know about Hell could fill a thimble
but that was my mother’s expression
and she earned the right to be blurred
and tell darkly wondrous jokes.
.
How did you get from there to here?
Whenever I crossed the street as a child
my mother shouted at me to be careful
and don’t talk to the men with armbands
their boots making noise
even deafness cannot block out.
.
And as she caught me at the door
wanting to go out and play
like a real over-here boy
she told me about the dangers over there
which she brought with her
lightened only by her little boy
endangered as he might be
and her darkly wondrous jokes.
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