Famished

Sprinting from task to task my sugar shakes tell me
nothing was ingested today but coffee, but a friend
has dropped off a loaf of braided bread, herbed
goat cheese. I eat standing, my humble/decadent Pesach. Today
I worked on a play about Residential School Survivors
and the many more lost. I finished a tiny pair
of beaded vamps for the children who died of
starvation and (mal)nutrition experiments. My grandmother
had one sister and two brothers who lived, and
more than that
who never saw adolescence, I don't know exactly
how many. There's a lot
I don't know.

She spoke about her school experience once,
when I complained about my homework. I had to read
that book in French, and if we misspoke the words
we were punished. That was all. Even then
I knew there was more to the story. Her eyes
spoke a closed world to me I can still almost see. Her
baby sister told me many years later, your grandmother
once whispered to me at school, if she didn't have kids
by the time she was 18, she would die. Starving
for love and family, a hunger for permanence. My hands
stop shaking now, and I taste the bread she never could
(a celiac who spent most of her life deadly sick until
it was diagnosed, then baked for her dozens of grandchildren
while eating
plain meat and rice.)

Earlier today at Yom Ho Shoah the horn sounded for six million dead
1.5 million children.
I mumbled the parts of the Kaddish I am beginning to learn
one year at a time, and hummed the Israeli music in snatches
of breath filled with pebbles. Robbie Waisman
implicated us with his stories as a survivor
tying the Holocaust to Canada's Indian Residential Schools, please pleas
to the blind-headed and the lame-hearted
to make it stop, make it one day truly be
never again. Skeletal pictures on the screen of people still somehow alive.
In the basement of the synagogue, stories of resistance.

In and after 1885 more women and children died of disease or starvation
than casualties from both sides. With no homes or guns
we ate gophers or our own dogs.

Robbie's spirit had come to me while beading; memories
of his little nephew Nathan and Nathan's mother Golda -

"I fell in love with her when I was eight, but gave her up
when my oldest brother Chaim married her. She had a curl in the middle of her forehead
like an upside down question mark."

- who refused
to leave her three-year-old and went to the gas chamber with him
in her arms.

"The famine ships from Ireland were floating coffins," my cousin said to me.
Like other family members, he tried to find our relatives back in Ireland,
but they were all long dead
with no descendants but those who survived the death ships. Here.

Not an unusual story, Robbie said to me two years ago, wiping away tears
that his own mother had gone to the same chamber in Treblinka. Robbie was her baby.
At 11 he watched his closest brother climb into the truck to be shot, and ran after it.
I wanted to tell him his mother was surely that life-force that stopped him
from being loaded in, that he was the comfort to her in death
and life, that her will to live was still present in his body, but instead
I said then and today, when we hug again, "Your family is proud of you. They see you."

"My name is Nya, I came to the Yom Ha Shoah today because
I am from Kenya and they are killing my people there. I have lost
most of my family."

I showed him the vamps saying they are also for Nathan and Golda.
One is thinner than the other to represent starvation. They are both

too tiny.

Then I go home to find the braided bread,
ram's horn echoing
in the gas chamber of my heart
and I eat and I eat while I peel potatoes for supper. Because

I'm famished.