A Dark Memory, A Poem, A Warning

 

STOP SIGNS

I am a child

This is Great-Grandma’s house

An evening visit

And I’m happy

Graham crackers and tea

Lamplight a dull yellow through a thick shade

Dark green carpet

Shelves holding a ceramic menagerie

A classical record playing softly in the background

 

I sit on her lap

Her hand is dry against my arm

Old skin as thin as the paper between apples in a gift basket

A fine calm night

 

The album is leather-bound and ancient

Portals of black and white

Magic rectangles with time-rusted edges

I have never seen her siblings before

Legends, all now dead

There were thirteen of them

And she the youngest, the only American-born

 

I see her young

Sitting on the riverbank

The Passaic River, Paterson, New Jersey

Before modern pollution

Still swimmable then

She sits on the ground

A book in her hands

A face like Katherine Hepburn

 

On the page across

Two of her brothers

Slightly older

Are happy, goofing

It looks like fun

Good fun

I laugh, until

I see the shirt one wears

 

I know that symbol

Evil, evil, evil, screams my child-brain

Someone took a plus sign,

Turned its four appendages  like plastic bendy straws

I know that symbol

I do not understand why it is there

 

In movies I watch with my father,

The enemy wears that symbol

My grandfather went to war to fight those men

I know this from his stories, his photos

Another black and white world I have seen

They tried to kill him

 He shot one of them and brought home a bullet-holed sleeve with that same evil sign

 

I point

“Why? What? Why?”

Great-Grandma draws in the air, deeply, slowly

I think she had forgotten that detail of the image

She hesitates, gathers words

And her voice is choked with sadness

 

“Back then, it was early,” she says gently

“We thought it was just a political party back in Germany

We didn’t know, we didn’t know …

And when we understood,

It was too late.”

 

The doorway to the past closes in her aged hands

I never see the rest of the portals

I do not turn around for many moments

Because I think she is crying

And I have never seen her cry

Until the day she dies, a decade later as she nears One-Hundred,

I do not see her cry

 

But I cry

I cry in a much later November  

I cry because I know how people might think it is just

a political party

I cry because when they understand, it is too late

 

And as another November nears now, I do not cry

After four years of chaos, I shake with rage this time

And I hope

That others

Will understand now

Because it is not quite too late

But almost

Almost.