Excerpt from Gods of Water and Air - for Sara R.

On Yom Kippur, in honor of my dear friend Sara, who as a teenager fought in the forests of Eastern Europe. On a day of atonement, I look up to my friend's courage and hope to find more of it within myself this year.
Chewing on 'Jew'

When I go, it will be with Chagall’s angel,
the one that hangs over the couch, floating on teardrop wings. Her candelabra keeps away the midnight forest that lives behind my eye, that deep shadethe sun can never erase.
No one asks, but they whisper
of my wartime because of my ageand German accent: was it a campor an attic? Even my children don’t askabout my teenage of fire and defiance. I hope they never have to knowhow to sleep on the pine dirt or stretch a soup with weedswhile hiding in the trees’ dank wells.
But then they made a movie about Jewish freedom fighters.I had to speak. I showed the clippings to my neighbor. Nice girl.I didn’t even know she was Jewish.I told her they took me to the premiere because of what I didwith the matches, how they wouldn’t light
the fuses on the tracks. Run! Run!Rain damped their words and the wet matchesshook in my hands, but I stayed. At thirteen.
I’m proud of festooning the woods with roses of fire and flesh.To have lit the chaos candles. Even if they took me too. Not so muchto live for: twilight-to-dawn hunger,hugging the dark for a pillow. Chewing on the word Jew and how it now meant animal.
Why should I have cared if the explosion ripped me into strips and mingled them with Nazi shreds?I had to grow up fast, to resist the commander’s hand on my breast. Was that why they left me
feverish on the ground? Or just that they had to move fast.
A miracle, I did not die.
Now a grandmother, I’m still strong as a rose singing into the California sun.When we hug, we light up
like the angel’s candlestickof dynamite that flaresand fights the dark.

for Sara Rosnow