Neighborhoods
I. Neighborhoods; i. Then and now
Elizabeth Anne Socolow
When I was small in Germantown,
where my grandfather
of the flatiron obsession took me walking,
to Karl Schurz Park
where the horseshoe of steps
welcomed a skipping girl to dare to walk along its edge,
and rollerskate along the shallow stairs,
where my Welsh nanny took me to Mass
daily at St Joseph's church,
with the red sandstone facade
like the color of Freiburg's Munster,
when the schwastikas appeared on the Bierstube doors
and the German songs came out the windows,
where we had Christmas for Agnes and Hannukah
for all of us, where the deaf mute tailors lived upstairs
and joined us in the basement in the deep Schwarzewald
of black shades for airraids with their forest green facings,
where, winter mornings I went to that basement
and watched the bigger brother, John, stoke the coal furnace,
we had a German butcher. It was not a joke, and he was witty.
I am the German Butcher, he would say, more sadly
than any sadness in this new world, I do remember his name.
It had field in it, and brook.
And I want him to save this world as he saved my world at four.
Each week we went for me, to buy the hard,
round red tokens, a lamb chop.
And once, solemn as a Priest, or Rabbi at Mass
or Atonement,
raining out, the background noise of rain,
my red boots on the black and white tile floor,
sawdust scattered, I still can see, the wood against the tile,
the tan against the black and white, and my red boots,
an image
without figure
spelling hope,
forever after, the beehive of those old
hexagons in old shops, black and white,
he stepped.
And handed me a brown paper bag, not the color of sawdust,
My child's eye keen on that small difference, paper, not wood,
and pointed at the floor, and handed me the bag.
His blue eyes held the rain in them behind his glasses, and
he let them shine not drop
somehow, not drop.
I put that sawdust down to save the people, so they will not slip,
or fall. It makes a mess. I sweep it up each night, before I close
the shop. I do that for the people, do you see, because I care.
And save your lambchop because I care that you grow strong.
We're not all--All Germans are not--even Butchers are not--
butchers who hate the sawdust mess so much they let the people
slip and fall, and break.
How can one fail to hope that side will win forever in all the world
with such a memory?
The smell in Germany is of plants that look as still as wood,
cactus in a sandy mesa.
Nowhere gas. Nowhere the pungency
of burned bones.
But in the curved backs of winter vines along the Rhine, the millions of tended branches not yet pendant with leaf or grape,
I still see the twisted bodies of the vanished
How can I trust with such a memory?
How can I judge without it?
How can I choose hope?
I watch the news, like you.
In dark hours what still assaults me
like a dream of a whole life slipping
past the sight of a dying soul:
We're not all--Germans are not all--butchers--are not butchers--
RED BOOTS
IN CLUMPS OF SAWDUST
AGAINST POLISHED TILES,
BLACK
AND
WHITE.