When I was inside my mother
her body was still reeling
with the blood of war—her blood
now the table from which
I fed, greedy, sustained. I was
the world she had lost,
the one receding like a ghost
from what she wanted
to remember and lingering
with all she wanted to forget.
Soon she would bathe me
a soaped cloth over my belly
and in between the tender toes.
I would laugh against her fingers
on my flesh as she touched my hip,
my chest, her hands running through
my unruly hair. Was I to hold her now
in my small arms; was I to walk into her future
as if my own? Was it me she wanted
or was it that girl she’d left behind
in the broken-down bunkers of Auschwitz,
the liquidated ghetto of Lodz?
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 2.
A child of Polish Holocaust survivors, Gail Newman was born in a Displaced Persons’ Camp in Lansberg, Germany. Her poems have appeared in journals including Nimrod International Journal, Prairie Schooner, and The Atlanta Review and in anthologies including Ghosts of the Holocaust, and America, We Call Your Name. A collection of poetry, One Worldwas published by Moon Tide Press. Blood Memory, chosen by Marge Piercy for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize won the 2020 Northern California Authors and Publishers Gold Award for Poetry and the 2021 Best Book Awards Winner in the “Poetry: Religious” category.
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