Fathoms
They were not so much parents
as they were History
my siblings but remnants
and me the 'New American'
as vague as I was specific
For Chagall we are shtetl dwellers
sneaking pork fried rice on Christmas
not sure where to land and where I
landed was not where we came from
I cannot know what we lost
but I know it
sounds like a word
looks like a face
feels like a touch
smells like a body I couldn't find
We all of us floated—
planting roots here
planting them there
What holds us in time and space
is neither clock nor measuring tape
nothing so steady as these
I know why I did what I did
how much must be told
to prove it?
two cents plain
in relief of my anguish
he offered seltzer and
Judy Collins Wildflowers
he reminded me that I
am here because a young
German conscript didn't shoot
my Soviet soldier father
the youth with a
twinkle in his eye
living himself to
breathe another day
the very same as the
one he gave away
with a night of no bullets
to waken fighting men
so nearly dead in sleep
so I sip the seltzer
sing along some with Judy
and thank a German soldier for
sparing the seed that made me
he was right—
the seltzer did the trick
Anna Wrobel, born of a WWII resistance partisan and Soviet soldier, is an American historian, teacher, poet and Holocaust Studies educator whose poems and essays appear in journals including Cafe Review, Lilith, Jewish Currents and the Maine anthologies, Wait and Port City Poems. Anna's poetry collections are Marengo Street (2012) and The Arrangement of Things (2018). She's presented at the Holocaust Human Rights Center of UMaine-Augusta, Maine State Museum, Puffin Foundation, Jewish Community Alliance, Colby College conferences, Maine Jewish Museum, USM's OLLI Sage Lectures series. Shoah poems from her manuscript, Sparrow Feathers:Second Generation / First Person, are explored by students here and abroad. Anna presents history and poetry in high school, college and adult settings. She studied theater, lived as a farmer-artisan, was a construction site foreman, and for over a decade was president of her local teachers' union. Anna's daughter was born on a Galilee kibbutz and her son in the mountains of Maine.