Yumpu_Catalogue_Peacemaking

the fish together with seltzer water, nutmeg,
white wine and finely diced celery ribs
while thinking about something sacred.
Anything so beautiful as to give up its hunger
for holiness, and shed its skin for the sacred childheart
is still not enough, won’t show me how to love. And there's nothing
edible in this poem. Nothing holy.
Only an apple, which tastes like apple, smells
like an apple. What else can an
apple mean here, in any other holy place it's the same, sweet fruit –
but on this cobblestone street
in Dachau where my grandmother
is said to have been beaten to death
and no one said Kaddish until a few minutes ago, I would eat
six million perfect apples as the one here in my palm and never feel full.
I’d embrace hundreds of loving and hating
Germans, Koreans, Catholics, Laotians, real women
and men, anything to let go of the ancient shadowboxer
in me who snorts nation
with each jab and wide hook – the one
seed who's never known an enemy
besides his own, dark imagination.
I can't start my life over. The landmarks
I know are all in poems, not in people's hearts.
There are no clear landmarks in this poem.
When I cross back over the Atlantic to Troy,
New York – home -- her milling ball quarry machines
and cookie factories burned like figures
my own youth had no time for – inside the American
womb of plenty up above our sacred, holy world
I'll eat this apple, I'll split it with
my mother and sisters over halvah, macaroons.
Jesse Waters