My aunt knew them well. I know
only their names and what other people have told me:
tinkers, haberdashers, attorneys, doctors,
Genss, Michelson, Itzkowitsch, Gulkowitsch…
Where are they now? Some of them were lucky enough
to be buried in this cemetery under a slab with Hebrew lettering.
But those my aunt met on the streets of German-occupied Tartu,
with a yellow star sewn to their clothes, and to whom
she even dared to speak to the horror of her friends:
they are not here, they are scattered
into nameless graves, ditches and pits
in many places, many countries, homeless in death
as in life. Maybe some of them are hovering
in the air as particles of ash, and have not yet
descended to earth. I’ve thought
that if I were a physicist I would like to study dust,
everything that’s hovering in the air, dancing in sunlight,
getting into eyes and mouths, into the ice of Greenland
or between the books on the shelf. Maybe one day
I would have met you,
Isaac, Mordechai, Sarah, Esther, Sulamith
and whoever you were. Maybe even today I breathed in
something of you with this intoxicating spring air;
maybe a flake of you fell today on the white white
apple blossom in my grandfather’s garden
or on my grey hair.
*