Why Poetry?

by Brett Rutherford

In memoriam: Annette Hayn

I see you always
in that photograph:
a Breslau schoolgirl
on a Sunday outing,
resting
beside a woodland path.
Everything is still before you:
in German Silesia
that 1930s forest
where wolves
and elf-kings peeping
from the fern-fronds,
were the only things to fear.

Had you already read
the Schiller plays
with their bold heroes
and valiant women,
the Heine poems,
and the Goethe?

How far beyond those woods
were the Nazis waiting
to deny you the right
to your own German?

You sat in the audience
as Steinberg's hands waved
a brave Beethoven
from the Kulturbund orchestra,
until even Beethoven
was denied you.
The Jewish Kulturbund Orchestra
was banned from playing German music.

Later, the night-boat to England,
to boarding school,
away from the coming horror
of Holocaust —
to America —
to marriage and children.

Something was missing
on those chamber-music afternoons
when your husband tore into
Brahms and Bartok,
excluding you —

no place to be
where the need for purpose
did not haunt you.

The business of the dead
is to be remembered.
The business of survivors
is to bear testimony:
But what is the business
of those who escaped?

Find something,
do something,
your husband urged you.
You had no cello,
no violin —
only your hands,
a pen,
an ear for making word
follow word,
tightrope-walking lines,
stanzas with their own
bright magic.

You found it, finally.
Your world:
      surreally seen,
      Delilah and Noah's wife.
      much to do with doll houses,
      sailboats lost and found,
      the tracery of your children's
      lives and marriages,
      and the friendships found
           among the poets.

You mined your own childhood, too
and found it haunted
by the tread of history:
your father in Breslau
dreading the times to come,
your mother skiing
as though her life depended on it.

The places cannot be recovered:
Breslau obliterated
      by the Red Army
and swallowed into Poland;
the Berlin of your schooldays
a patchwork of memories,
your parents' names unwritten,
      fading from a whisper
           to the never-spoken

but you found your truth at last
in your poems and books,
where your escape
      bookended with silences
gifts us with thoughts
that will not perish.

— October 2, 2004, rev. 2019