Persecution
for Robert Pinsky
Author’s Note: Persecution is a poetic sequence that is an outcome of my communication with Robert Pinsky. This poetic sequence of three poems, namely “Instead of an Email,” “After Auschwitz” and “A Signature of Piss,” deals with the very theme of persecution itself in cultural politics across the world. Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are political inventions – instruments of torture in use for centuries and still going strong, even finding their new strength in the 21st century. Pinsky born into a Jewish family still bears the burden of his religious community’s collective memories of persecution culminating into the Holocaust, and I’m being culturally persecuted for some of the so-called grand narratives like race, nationality and religious politics. These narratives are probably created with a discriminatory purpose. In this poetic sequence, poetry and politics come together to make us aware of this world’s socio-cultural and political reality. Today even a non-partisan liberal like me gets caught in the crossfire between the jihadist terrorists and the crusading war hawks and is often ripped off by their antagonistic politico-cultural assertions that stem from the very same germination process, hypocrisy by its non-euphemistic name.
Instead of an Email
i
I carefully flip through the pages of your books.
You look lastingly calm on the surface but I see the bits
wearing away from beneath your stony bulk.
You take sustenance from the roots of your Jewishness,
which isn’t simply for the cover of The Figured Wheel.
Who unlearns the Holocaust horrors? Memory
is Ovid’s wounds in Tomis, a wildfire eating trees
and shitting ashes and tall charcoals. And here I am,
a long-barreled gun loaded with mistakes. Something
gets pressed under a double drum road roller.
I strive against the tyranny of thoughts. (I need
facelifting, as crucial as packets of silica gel in a shoebox.)
Yet every thought seems to be a wind-coarsened twig
on which my feelings grow as leaves. What am I?
A campaign for the Albigensians’ love outside marriage?
Or the home-grown contempt for it? I’m not durable
as acid-free archival-grade paper. I’m recycled, made
through pulping and de-inking, rough fibers poking through.
ii
I’m at best a foothill at the base of a mountain range,
with no hope at all to be one of its highest peaks.
Even my grandparents didn’t start seeing each other
when you crawled out of your crib toward your parents’
bed, and my father was not even a dream for them.
When your name was pinned to the sky, I wasn’t
even an embryo in my mother’s womb. Yet the distance
– whether of a place or a time or anything else –
somewhat gets bridged as some incorrigibles say.
iii
You sent your books without any inscriptions
like oiled peacock feathers we kids lovingly put inside.
Is it because of the distance we were born with?
Yes, you’re now a senior white American Jew
and I’m a junior brown Bangladeshi “secular”
(even “secular” means in the West a cover for “terrorist”).
I read out “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” to my students
and like Whitman don’t give a damn about distance.
Can’t we ever say like him, Distance avails not?
But the distance waits in ambush like an assassin
and plans like an abortionist to kill the embryo
of our liberating trust, shaking the very base
of my telescopic love for you and for your poems
sparklingly pinned to my night sky. I’m earthier,
so my love will be soiled with suspicions.
In the wake of the Confederate flags flying
o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
I know brown won’t ever be de-browned to white.
I’m a genealogist, cracking the encryption codes
of all those suspicions under my critical lenses.
Oh, don’t let color and culture make distance between us.
Elsewhere lines of sanity are now increasingly blurred.
Erich said Hear, O Israel! A new Holocaust is raging on.
So between an anvil and a hammer I stammer:
For Jews in Hitler’s war my sad tears drip,
Also for kids bombed out in the Gaza Strip.
Not anti-Semitic but you know Zionists never get it.
You’re no longer a fiddler on the roof. Our hearts
are urns of Auschwitz’s ashes. Let our conscience
scramble to intercept our criminal silences for survival.
***
Read the second and third poems in this sequence.
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Photo by Scott Johnson /Flickr