For my last uncle,
death was so slow.
At the end
there was no distinction
between breathing and not breathing.
At graveside I fill the spade, wishing for
the Ukrainian loam that covers
my grandparents and all their history.
I’d suck on each pebble,
lick each grain of dirt from my palm,
hoping for a taste of stories
about favourite songs sung after Shabbos dinner,
a surly neighbor, a summer outing,
before the armies came, and the typhus.
After my father’s death, I sloughed off
the false name he had been given
and began a yearning for what I could never know.
I wanted to fill clothbound books
with a girl’s round letters,
telling the stories that should have happened next,
of sentimental mothers and proud fathers,
rich in their found children
who were blown across the ocean
like birdlings to nest in new families.
But silence filled the pages with sand.
At the cemetery, my cousins and I hold hands
and hear the crows’ wings of our fathers’ secrets
flap up out of the grave
and we cry, tell us everything.
