ON THAT DAY
Mel Waldman
The old city is gone.
And the person I was before it happened
is buried in a distant place on that day.
I say kaddish.
And now, the city rushes across space and time,
but sometimes it is a
frozen landscape in my mind,
unkind to human eyes on that day,
still moments intruding upon my peace
in a reign of terror,
trapped in crevices of my brain,
and a flood of death-rain
pouring human debris in my face.
I suppose I’ll never erase that day.
I’ll never get away.
Even with the laughter and joy of new creations
and the birth of babies, evoking hope,
the past intrudes, like a
sprawling shadow of a lamppost in my mind,
unkind to human eyes on that day,
metastasizing trauma to every part of me.
You see, I’m not supposed to forget.
To love life, I believe, is to move ahead
while rushing toward the past too,
acknowledging evil-all sins, losses and horrific truths,
but knowing that beauty is the
Tree of Life,
coming forth from a magical seed,
created in a secret moment of design.
This is what I conceive.
If only I face this death and taste it too,
and look beyond and within,
droplets of faith will cover me like the
invisible skin of soul
I’ve never seen but
sometimes feel.
Then I will be more than a
cave dweller trapped in a
cave of rock and darkness
on that day.
Bathed by a distant and immanent light,
I will be free,
even when I revisit the old city
on that day.
Free
