Sweet 100s
Spring established, I dare to plant tomatoes.
It’s an act of faith, as much as anything, to think
that I’ll be here to eat the fruits come August,
when rain and sun have brought the scraggly vines
to juicy bearing. Another year, I’d have said
that fall will come if I am here or not.
This year, who knows? A few tomatoes
in an old woman’s backyard garden
aren’t high on the world’s agenda. Hunger
is the planet’s crop, and roiling anger,
not Sweet 100s, tomato worms, and rust.
Never mind. I tuck acrid vines
into their loamy beds, to sleep and grow
until some hungry creature comes to reap.
Berdichev, Ukraine, 1997
October light. A few yellow leaves
cling to birch trees overhead.
Blackberry vines scrabble over graves
once weighted with concrete slabs,
massive headstones
meant, perhaps, to keep the dead from rising
until Messiah comes.
The slabs are tumbled and broken,
the weedy graves are bare.
Shattered chunks of concrete
white as bones
are scattered across the graveyard.
The tattered old Jew leads us
through brambles, over shards of stone.
But the names we’re looking for are lost,
smashed into dust.
Who did this? we ask him.
Nazis? Russians? Your neighbors?
He shrugs, the universal Jewish shrug—
what difference does it make?Somebody did it—
somebody always will do it.We turn to go.
Overhead, the yellow birches.
