We're beginning a new
occasional posting of poems from Blood to
Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (ed. Charles Fishman). The
second edition came out in 2007 and contains the work of 240 poets.
The first poem in this
series is by Helen Degen Cohen, a poet who survived the Holocaust and came to
the US as a Displaced Person.
I remember
coming into Warsaw, a child
out of a sheer, sunlit countryside,
where sometimes a goat made the only sound in
all the universe, and a car engine would certainly
tear the wing of an angel. Entering burnt Warsaw
and the Sound of the World, how strange, how lonely
the separate notes of Everything, lost in a smell of
spent shots still smoking, a ghost of bombs, a silence
of so many voices, the ruined city singing not only
a post-war song but an Everything hymn of dogs wailing,
a car, a horse, a droning plane, a slow, distant
demolition, hammers like rain, the hum, the hum,
bells and levers and voices leveled and absorbed
into the infinite hum in which the ruins
sat empty and low like well-behaved children,
the ruins, their holes, like eyes, secretly open,
passing on either side, as we entered Warsaw, an air
of lost worlds in a smoky sweet light ghosting
and willing their sounding and resounding remains
out of a sheer, sunlit countryside,
where sometimes a goat made the only sound in
all the universe, and a car engine would certainly
tear the wing of an angel. Entering burnt Warsaw
and the Sound of the World, how strange, how lonely
the separate notes of Everything, lost in a smell of
spent shots still smoking, a ghost of bombs, a silence
of so many voices, the ruined city singing not only
a post-war song but an Everything hymn of dogs wailing,
a car, a horse, a droning plane, a slow, distant
demolition, hammers like rain, the hum, the hum,
bells and levers and voices leveled and absorbed
into the infinite hum in which the ruins
sat empty and low like well-behaved children,
the ruins, their holes, like eyes, secretly open,
passing on either side, as we entered Warsaw, an air
of lost worlds in a smoky sweet light ghosting
and willing their sounding and resounding remains
______________________________________
Helen Degen Cohen’s
(Halina Degenfisz’s) awards include a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)
fellowship in poetry, First Prize in British Stand Magazine's fiction
competition, and three Illinois Arts Council Literary awards.
Once an
Artist-in-Education and instructor for Roosevelt University, she co-edits Rhino
Magazine and coordinates its Poetry Forum workshop. Widely published
in periodicals, she was twice "featured poet" in The Spoon
River Poetry Review, and her work has been the subject of essays such as
"Rootlessness and Alienation in the Poetry of Helen Degen Cohen" (Shofar)
and "This Dark Poland" (Something of My Very Own to Say,
Columbia University, Press).
In 2009 she had two
poetry collections published—Habry and On A Good Day One
Discovers Another Poet—as well as an excerpt from her novel, The
Edge of the Field (in Where We Find Ourselves—SUNY). A new
chapbook, Neruda Nights, is available from Finishing Line Press.
______________________________________
A review of Helen Degen Cohen's Habry, a collection of poems on the Holocaust, appeared several years ago in Writing the Holocaust. To go to the review, click here.
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