THE HEAVINESS OF A STONE
I never met my father’s mother,
he left her there in the old country,
in Bessarabia, between the world wars.
She likely died in the slaughterings.
My mother’s mother I know best from
a photograph: a stately woman
in what might have been her wedding dress.
She died when I was four years old.
What can I tell you? In our house
aunts, uncles, back from the graveyard,
first washed hands at the hose on the lawn,
for days sat shiva on lowly seats,
orange crates brought from the family store.
I watched them bent low, not understanding.
I was four; I stood in a chair
and wondered to see somehow in the corner
an oval mottled stone, gray-brown,
maybe weighing ten pounds...later learned
the customs of death: that mirrors are draped;
that a stone set down in the house of death
as if the house had swallowed a stone.
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