A Time for Such a Word

-Florence Weinberger
August 10, 2010

Though they are lured from the world’s oceans and squeezed into a place small enough to become a vanishing point, though they leap and dart and leap again with grace and terror, intelligent enough to sense their fate as their faith begins to ebb, though we hear their songs skid into wails as the boats enter their space, though we see the men raise and aim and thrust their spears like the whalers of the past, the water seething into  white foam, the furious seepage as the white turns red and spreads and spreads, their flailing gradually dying, a brief quickening before the surface of the water stills, becomes silent, stays red like a bright sun reflected on earth, I cannot bring myself to call this a Holocaust.

The word has been deeded to people: to Jews and Gypsies, to cripples and dissidents. It is a leap not as swift as the ocean’s mammals flying through water, to imagine them nearly human. Or the earth itself alive, with its inner shifting and constant cracking, its tumbling lava, its winds, its falling ice and crackling air, clouds thundering against each other, whispering ants and the arias of wings. Will these deaths be a Holocaust?

I am a Jew made out of words. The Hebrew word davar means both word and thing; the words of God made worlds. With words we make poems and vows and weddings. We describe. We believe we are better than bugs because we speak. We describe what we see here, in this remote cove that is the coda and last home of a species that speaks with squeaks and squeals, and sings. What shall we call this death?

I am going to die with a heart full of unanswered questions.

Florence Wienberger is the author of three published collections of poetry, The Invisible Telling Its Shape (Fithian Press,1997) and Breathing Like a Jew (Chicory Blue Press, 1997), and Carnal Fragrance, (Red Hen Press, 2004), and the forthcoming Sacred Graffiti, to be published by Tebot Bach. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her  poetry has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Another Chicago Magazine, Antietam Review, The Comstock Review, The Pedestal, Solo, Rattle and Spillway, and anthologies such as Family Reunion: Poems About Parenting Grown Children, So Luminous the Wildflowers, Images From the Holocaust, and Lifecycles: Jewish Women on Biblical Themes in Contemporary Life.