Before Our Eyes by Wilner Eleanor;

Author:Wilner, Eleanor;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

ON ETHNIC DEFINITIONS

In the Jewish Cemetery in Prague,

the ghetto was so small, so little

space for the living, and less (by rights)

for the dead—they were buried

standing up. Hear the underground

train to Sheol, packed

for the rush-hour of ghosts—when

the train arrives, when the final trump

sounds and the Saved dead rise,

with a sigh, they’ll at last lie down.

OF A SUN SHE CAN REMEMBER

After they had been in the woods,

after the living tongue woke Helen’s

hand, afterwards they went back

to the little house of exile, Annie and

Helen, who had lived in the silent

dark, like a bat without radar in

the back of a cave, and she picked up

the broken doll she had dismembered

that morning in her rage, and limb

by limb, her agile fingers moving

with their fine intelligence over each

part, she re-membered the little figure

of the human, and, though she

was inside now, and it was still dark,

she remembered the missing sun

with a slow wash of warmth

on her shoulders, on her back—

as when you step shivering out of

a dank shade into the sun’s sudden

balm—and as the warmth spread,

it felt like the other side of water,

and that is when she knew how

light on water looks, and she put

her outspread hands into the idea

of it, and she lifted the lines of light,

cross-hatched like a web, out of

the water, and, dripping, stretched

the golden net of meaning in the light.

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