The Twin Rottweilers of Guilt and Forgiveness

The mud floor of the woods outside my Michigan house
is dark as German chocolate,
and sticks to my shoes the way my sister,
Tahl, thinks cake does to her hips:
her thighs shuddering gently as we pass the bistro
where she had her last piece of the heavy confection,
her one unyielding temptation, her only guilt.

What I want to know is: what don't the Germans have
to feel guilty about?  Even in their pleasures, they are
sinful and dark.  They grind up their animals
for a million kinds of wurst: liver, blut, brat, and knock
to name only a few, and think of their superstars:
Nietzche and Wagner, Hegel and Jung
though it will be noted that toward the end of his life,
Herr Doctor Jung emphatically asserted his Swiss roots.
He is the man who knew, not too much too soon,
but rather just enough too late.  Think of his whitened head,
lolling on his shoulders, this way then that as he drowses,
like a Jew's head a few houses down, braced to  the shoulders
by a few intractable tendon fibers,
an Ubermensch or two standing by
and a billy club.

But Tahl is studying to be a Rabbi now.  She eats strudel
and talks of Buber: did you know that Arabs paid respect at his grave?

Imagine you are liberated from a Concentration Camp. It's 1945
and you're not vermin anymore, the Allied forces are happy to tell you. 
Now a Russian soldier is calling  "Who speaks German?"
which of course you do. The Nazi is dying in bed
his skin is so badly burnt, open wounds do not bleed; he needs your forgiveness.
He must have your forgiveness.  The fate of one immortal soul
depends on your next three words.  Remember:
Your parents are ashes.  Your siblings: dead.
Your Thunder God was silenced by Panzers
eclipsed by the Luftwaffer, trod by steeltoe  boots,
ground by gears like broken crosses.   You yourself are worn thin
like an old rug with a small basketball for a skull,
your skin is the rind of an overripe melon sagging from your cheekbones,
wet, pale twigs for fingers, your nails held to your toes
by gravity and caked mud alone.  You do not remember wearing shoes this year.
And this Nazi pleads, begs, Forgive me.

And then it's too late: The year is 1947 and my father,
an eight year old boy, has just shot an Arab outside Jerusalem,
once shot, he does not die quickly.  Years after, Golda Meir would say:
"I can forgive the Arabs for murdering our children,
but not for turning our children into murderers."
My father would become a physician
and in America he would raise my siblings and me,
in this country bordered by two oceans which erode the national memory,
rivers that carry Indian tears out to sea
and on cable television, anchors ask this question every May:
"What don't the Germans have to feel guilty about?"

This Passover, the words will be different,
I will sing "Bashana hazot ani sole’ach lakhem,"
"this year, I forgive you" and I will sing,
"Last year, we were slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt,
this year, we are slaves without the luxury of a  master."
I will not recite the "sh'fokh khamatkha," will not incant,
"Pour out thy wrath on the nations that know Thee not,"
for everyone is a  nation that knows Thee not
and we are all headed for Ya’el's tent,
some tentatively, some in fear, and still others
carrying their own hammer and spike.

Tahl is teaching me to swing my arms a little as I walk
and carry my hands at my sides, loose and light
like the frayed tip of a bullwhip; she is thin and smiles at me.
I tell her: You have never looked more beautiful.




Translating the Book of Proverbs

It’s nineteen seventy-three.
My older brother, Ithamar, is ripping up grass
  with his bare hands and punching the black dirt.
In a few moments, he’ll go over to my mother’s
  compost heap and kick the shit out of it.
He’s swearing in at least three languages:
  Hebrew, Arabic and English and shouting “ha-ya”
every time he kicks or hits something.  Bruce Lee has just died.

I don’t come along for another month or so
 and in the OB-GYN ward, my parents forget the destruction
     of their garden and lawn, and the stench of decay on the doghouse,
but Ithamar is still sullen and his grades never recovered.
  Shortly after that, he’ll leave their house in backwoods Pennsylvania
      to live with his birth-mother in Israel. My father tells me Ithamar will die  there,
and in a way he does: he serves in the army and ends up an elevator installer,
  then a chef, then CPA and a father of three monoglottal boys.
       Ithamar rents Enter the Dragon, dubbed in Hebrew, on their birthdays.

What happens to me goes like this:
I leave home for college in 1991 and my best friend is shot and killed.
  He was no Bruce Lee, but his death is still a surprise
and sends me into the yard, where I look at the compost heap
  but do not kick it, and consider the grass but do not even riffle it.
After a few long breaths, I pick up the phone and call Lisa, his girlfriend,
  tell her I’ll be over and that I’ll bring food.  This is the Jewish thing to do.
The African proverb says “When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers,”

and no grass has known suffering like my parents’,
  but the better saying comes from an experience on Alpengeist,
       a change-your-hairline fast rollercoster in an amusement park in Virginia.
David Cutler, my Mormon friend who learned Cantonese on his mission,
  leans over and says “Are you strapped down and ready
       for what you know is about to occur?”  For which the answer was “no.”
Who could be ready for so many sheer drops and inverted loops?
  Bruce Lee might have been, but look how far that got him;
       Chris practiced aerobatics in a Glass Aire, spins and dives

over the cow-pastures of central Florida.  But they didn’t know
what was about to occur, and neither did we,
  and neither does the grass, which bears the brunt of our grief.
Compost alone is strapped down and ready,
  so it translates for the elephants as they stagger away
and for the grass while it resettles in the dust of the steppe;
  the compost rewrites the book of proverbs, which begins “Latet Lefta’im,”
to give prudence to the simple; to the young man, knowledge and discretion.

GADI NEVO BEN-YEHUDA is the  product of Florida State University, American University, and a hyper-literate Jewish household.   His poems have appeared in ACM, Borderlands: The Texas Poetry Review, and Folio.  Gadi works as the webmaster at the Alliance to Save Energy, and he knows that energy efficiency is the cheapest, cleanest, quickest way to increase our national energy supply and boost national security.  He does not have cats.

Visit Gadi Nevo Ben-Yehuda's website at: www.ase.org
Email: gbyehuda@ase.org

ForPoetry