Puffing smoke; The space you inhabit

The space you inhabit

for Jacob Rosenberg   i.m.  1922–2008

You said that poetry remembers

where history forgets itself.

You told me, words have shadows

that are left behind after they pass the lips.

You gave me “The Little Boat”:

its simplicity; its tenderness;

the shared song of its longing drift and faraway port.

So very vivid your eyes with a child’s sparkle,

so very tough your judgement with a parent’s certainty,

a good age when we met, your generous heart

held the map of a painful knowledge.

And your forgiveness, escapee from a hatred

incomparable, systematic, premeditated;

still named the lesson we should carve into our souls for vigilance.

But this life of yours:

what celebration of goodness; what creative compassion.

How did camps exterminate so much

yet leave you with a voice?

How did horror so express its hieroglyphics of loathing,

yet leave you with language a breeze in your sails?

Robbed of family, you clung to the steerage of imagination.

Out of traditions of prayer and chant;

out of a history of learning and burning;

your mind anchored itself in stone, rock, sweat.

From the school of the ghetto, university of Auschwitz;

and in the belly of Mauthausen tagged “return not desired”,

moment by moment, you lifted the boulder, counted the steps,

all the while gathering timbers in your mind

to frame your small craft; furling canvas for its willing sails.

You drew from the heave and list, the wisdom to know

how to leave the word and its shadow with us.

Solid in the very air, smoke its ink, screams its text,

a murderous wave rolled across Europe.

And yet after, the Little Boat, buoyant, bobbing, carried

you at the helm, breathing in the clean sea-salted air,

face turned towards the light.

Regret only for time’s speed, lost moments,

its waste fills my mourning; your spirit

skimming from moorage across the last open tide.

I hold to me the poems you left

between the covers of a book

whose cardboard frame will one day crumble.

But you? Not as long as poetry remembers.

Robyn Rowland