One for Warsaw, Vietnam and the World

~~because I was told I could not write of Auschwitz

since it was no part of my experience or heritage

So. Warsaws’s children are not mine:
my children’s heads sleep safely
and I only have one great grandmother
who is Jewish. One eighth of my blood
is not enough to make a charm, and the
blood of Bly’s small-boned bodies
is no part of the arithmetic of me.
Yet, who can speak of math?

What miraculous algebra makes an equation
of those six million hearts that stopped
so quietly that no one heard them cease
and one four-month-old nephew dead
of a cancerous liver?
(“Very rare in one so young.”)
Is the one idiocy greater than the other?

And who can mourn more than once
in all the ticking of our clocky hearts?

At seventeen, I was glad I had been born in ‘40,
too late to bear the blame for Belsen.
But an ape named Adam
tricked us with our common blood:
We all baked long pig in those ovens.

You say I must not speak of
children’s sharded ankle-bones,
I have no right, who only vomited
at the pain of a small son’s tonsillectomy;
I must not shudder that Vietnamese skin
is routinely crackle-glazed by napalm,
whose chief experience with pain is labor,
my rage must be stillborn;
I must turn from India’s ancient stick-boned women,
beasts for bearing bundles too heavy for a donkey,
for I have only boggled at the sight
of a bedsore drilled down to bone
on an old woman in a charity ward,
who had lived long past a decent death, anyway;
I must not ache to understand
what makes that Black man stand,
rather than sit next to me on a bus,
for certainly, my blood is white in my veins.

to hell with you

I have the heritage of my eyes
I will mourn whom I please,
and how I choose:
My motherhood is all claim I lay to pain,
my opposable thumb, all the claim I need on sorrow.

Published, “Dimension” May 23, 1969
Julia Ingeborg Ursula Larsen Douglass Li (AKA) puddle