Something told me I had a poem about names; just not the one I thought.
Written in March 1997, a strange and scary period of my life. Some will
know others may not: "sanctification of the name" is a translation of
the Hebrew "Kiddush HaShem," applied to people martyred. Grade: B-, too
wordy, needs work.
SANCTIFICATION OF THE NAME
Shtetl is the Yiddish word for a small town
or village in the 19th century Russian Pale of Settlement.
In my mind's eye, the shtetl of Wolma
is a crooked construct, God's science project
gone awry: a Chagall dream
of muddy streets and Shabbos candles,
and strangely angular people, my ancestors perhaps,
afloat over the town in acts of vision and conception.
In that shtetl, people learned to fly
because life on earth was too awful to imagine.
When crippled beggars dreamed, it was not of walking
but of wings, of a world of angels.
When Napoleon came to Poland, the Sons and Daughters Of
had last names breathed into them:
whimsical beautiful constructs from Nature
like Rosengarten, or marks of their trade like Shumacher,
or simply anchors to the places of their birth.
My family, earthbound dreamers from then `til now,
became Wolman, the people of Wolma,
bound to its soil, bound to its air
on which they floated even when my grandfather
snaked out toilet pipes in Brooklyn
or my grandmother died facing an airshaft
on that fragrant lie of a name, Orchard Street.
It is obeisance to History to carry the artifacts
and memory contained in one's name,
wound round the viscera in perpetual birth.
The town whose name I carry no longer is there.
It has become another artifact in a library,
a Memorial Book and manifest of names:
a village in History swept up the chimney
to a place where its air-dwelling residents may dream.
-----------------------------
Ken Wolman
Miercom
www.mier.com
609-490-0200, ext. *8-14
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