PRAYING IN AMERICA
Consigny, Scott
PRAYING IN AMERICA to Scott Consigny 1 Prayer in America, a cold transaction. My father's on my mind. When he was overseas did he fall in love in England? With a girl named Eileen, grateful for...
...Melvin Wilk Melvm Wilk...
...Father, you aren't even dead...
...Loving the victim is as difficult as loving oneself...
...You do not protest, but you are not silent...
...Over there they moved into our home, Here it's been torn down...
...At the tombstone, a fleeing Jewish man, skinny as smoke, drops from the sky, his trousers shining with blood from his ride on Bober's swing, the Auschwitz director who liked to play with Jewish parts, beating them until they split, like eggshells clubbed...
...The lesson moves everywhere...
...Hating the torturer is easy...
...I keep on breathing, I keep on surviving, clutching my yarmulke against the whirlwind, as you dance with Eileen to that old black magic called love...
...But because it was you it turns out to be me after all...
...The teachers sink down from the heavens I breathe deeply...
...To learn what is in the air makes survival itself a form of prayer...
...My father, my Judaism, I betray you...
...I know, Father, had it not been for you, it could have been me...
...whose poetry oppeored in our September issue, teaches English and Jewish Studies at Iowa State University yh.s poem is from o recently completed book il\l FXLE...
...With a girl named Eileen, grateful for the cigarettes, his family warmth, the way he held her as they danced to Frank Sinatra singing, "That Old Black Magic," during a blackout in the sitting room of her tipsy aunt...
...I speak only because our secrets outlive us...
...I falter...
...The world considers a non-Jewish Israel and nobody laughs...
...3 If it is your voice I hear you teach me that in the study of our people lives the restoration of our loss...
...I kill you in my poems...
...Forgive my lack of silence...
...I try to take myself in hand, listen to my heart, remain faithful...
...Here at the grave of Avram ben Shevl, your father, in this tenement crowded cemetery in the roar of international transports I want to tell you about my life...
...After the war from Eileen's letter, that my mother never showed my father but didn't hide from me, a picture fell of a girl who looked as if she never raised her voice...
...My mother tore the snapshot up and flushed the pieces down the toilet...
...2 I'm wearing a yarmulke...
Vol. 1 • January 1976 • No. 6
