Large Brown Eyes: A Traveler's Journal

Part I

Published on November 23, 2004 By TaBooTenente In Religion

6/2/1998
Yad V'Shem (Hand and name) Holocaust Memorial Museum, Jerusalem

"Don't fix your
large brown eyes upon me....
And don't ask me
Why and wherefore
we have to leave our homes."
--SB Shayewicz, "Lekh Lekha" 1942

Dedalus,

Consider how quiet it is here, now. Earlier I was angry.

Bless the girl beside me for singing, or for making me believe she was mourning. They have seen it before. They live this truth their whole lives, day to day. No. It's a matter of respect. I want to smash irreverent children who made this place impossible for silence. Not all. Most. Me?

Should this be a place of mourning? Who am I to accuse others of irreverance? Nevertheless. Still. Look how life continues, flowing on like one map of veins, inside this grave and outside, too, with smiling, laughing, even arms stretching happily toward the sun. I wish I carried a gun like everyone else here, not to shoot, but to command silence. I wish I were leading children through these halls. I wish I were speaking the horror to them, as I see it: the silence of the nations' responses; the silence of bravery in their exhausted eyes as they faced the grinning guns, their broken spines curving toward the death pits, even seconds before the bullets; the silence of photographs and piles of children's shoes; the silence of a tired, troubled history.

But there is no silence....What are they talking about? Dedalus, where are we? Where should we go?

Where did we die?
We met our deaths without our shoes
drifting from museum to museum
this generation and another and another
We met our deaths standing open our shoeless feet.

Do not hate me. Do not talk to me.
Be with me.
Do not forget
and we will live forever
in our endless, echoing deaths.

I am in the forest underneath the trees
where the river runs
under a lazy, speckled sun,
running through river bells
to a moonlit, soundless sea.
--that's me, Dedalus.

I'm out of words. What else could be written, least of all by me? But, by my g-d, should I ever have children they will learn of this, from the first day they might comprehend until the day they leave me to make their own lives. In ten years' time, those that witnessed this absurdity unfold will die, and pass away from the earth. Some few must always remember. If not? If not, may all people pass completely away from the earth; may all children turn in disgust from their parents; may the sea wash all signs of human life from the trees, the mud, the stones, and the infinite sands on the infinite seas on this saddest of all possible earths.

Copyright ©2004, ©2005, ©2006 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.
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Comments

nataUN

on Nov 25, 2004

i like this one too tbt, but it's not the way i remember you talking about it. we'll go over it when i see you this afternoon.

peace,

e

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