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Ida Lewin (1906–1938)
AlwaysWinter, Poland
20.
I’ve heard that Polish wives
cook beets into a broth
that bleeds, as though from hemorrhage.
They fill white bowls
with dumplings pressed into the shape
of shrunken ears, their thumbs
molding pastry to look
like lobe and auricle. Awful,
to hear one’s own devouring
before it comes.
Consider ears.
They know the scrape
that metal makes inside the bowl—
pale cochleae, so vulnerable
they float across the soup,
poor things, that cannot seal
themselves against the sound but roll,
ears swirling past a spoon.
I wonder at this meal
for cannibals.
With such an audience below,
who wouldn’t lose the taste for dough?
5.
I am like the fire
from a Shabbes candle—
no larger than a poplar leaf,
barely luminous
enough to rustle
shadows from the wall.
How can I warm more
than my flickering self?
or blaze against
bad dreams, a breeze
which pushes back
the branches of my sleep?
Now winter,
when the trees strip bare,
my face remains
the only light. I shimmer
in the air and read
my own reflection there.
21.
Once I held a painted miniature
of the Madonna,
her face so small she fit
inside my fist, but still left room
to hide two zloty coins
that I threw into the fountain,
a pinch
of poppy seeds for feeding finches,
a psalm to read beside
the rebbe’s tomb,
where every word
turns stone or plumes into a bird—
silhouette and light, both fall and flight.
22.
I watch the Polish women sell
their wares—ham hocks
and hooves, blood sausages
strung up like strands of beads,
cakes black with poppy seeds,
and rows of amber honeyjars
where warmth is crystallized,
refracting like the stained glass
of a church, each liquid ray
so yellow-sweet
I draw my finger through the light.
What freedom in this commerce.
A woman brushes up against
a man, coins dropping palm to palm,
their contact quick as breath
and treif as pork.
There are evenings when I dream
the taste of bacon, the soft whisper
of a stranger’s hand on mine.
His words are salt and sugar,
kosher but only in
the sacred law of my own skin.
End
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