Surviving

Poetry Sunday on WCAI.

At home in the country of my childhood, I went to the markets
and saw the numbers
tattooed on skin become old, a sleeve

falling back from a forearm, the ink of the camps faded and wrinkled.
That was when I stopped telling people
I’d survived a test, or an awkward

moment, or a difficult visit. Survival is about none of those things:
it is about skin and bone and
breath. Even as a child, I understood that.

It is skin and bone and breath that cries out
in the countries of rendition,
where cellars drip water to chill, to electrocute

and men with hard faces drag make-believe answers from exhausted lips.
It is skin and bone and
breath that cries out when a woman learns

her home is a killing ground, slammed against walls, kicked, battered.
It is skin and bone and
breath that cries out when an

animal is tortured, a child is molested, a life is ended.
Survival is more than a heart can endure
when flesh screams for an end to pain. At home

in the country of my childhood, I played on overgrown Nazi bunkers,
ran laughing past the place
where submarine activity was monitored to kill

my people and those who stood with them. It happened
long before I was born—I lived only with
the memories in the old people’s eyes,

only with the curses on the names of those who had occupied
my city and destroyed its faith. Only
with the numbers tattooed

where no numbers should be, echoes of the camps where
death was welcomed and captured
women parachutists were shoved alive into

ovens, and I said I had survived? I’d survived nothing.
But when the sun shone on those markets
and picked out the brilliant colors of flowers

and fruit, the very presence of those numbers was enough to say:
We survive.