Aliyah
 
I read the book
I camp on every word.
I hear the songs
that I have never heard.
I look at things
that I have never seen
And I return
to where I've never been.
 
The songs of Zion
comfort, give me rest.
For Abrams hear
beats within my breast.
The hills, the stones, the roses,
there I find,
when I return
in the Aliyah of my mind.

      - David Lewis


Too Young
 
I was born in 1959.
I am too young to know
that you can get to hell
on a railway car.
 
I cannot know
what it is like
To see Dante's Inferno,
jackbooted
coming down my street.
 
I try to imagine.
I really do.
I want to share
in the unspoken fellowship
of the suffering.
Without it
sometimes I feel less Jewish,
but I cannot imagine
 
Mine is a lifetime
in which Israel has always existed.
In which El Al lands at Kennedy,
and Frankfurt.
And for this sometimes,
I apologize.
 
Mine is a life where,
when darkness crowds around me,
and nightmares overtake me,
and sweat beads upon my forehead,
my screams will wake me up.
Your would not.
 
I cannnot remember.
But this does not mean I will forget.
I will tell my son
Israel,
and my daughter
Sarah,
and they will neither forget.


     - David Lewis



Legacy
 
 
I was conceived in the madness
of love
in madness.
 
Endowed with the genes of despair,
and the frailty of hope.
 
At a brie in the womb,
my heart was circumcised.
 
Born with a scarred soul,
an inheritance of pain,
a legacy of tears.
 
My crib sat in the shadows,
of empty cribs.
My laughter evoked tears of loss.
My joy brought distanced silence.

Childhood friends were ghosts,
of those who were,
and would have been.
 
Bedtime stories filled my dreams,
with sounds,
of breaking glass.
 
I slept with nameless spirits,
and woke to dreams of Zion.
 
They are gone.
but we share a shadow.
For I am who they were,
and they are who I am.
 
And Israel,
with her dowry of hope,
has wed us both.


      - David Lewis