Enough with Viktor Frankl
and his search for meaning.
Can’t we acknowledge survival while
also conceding that sometimes
horror is as mystifying
as beauty.
When we’re standing on a ledge,
leaning over a canyon rim,
enveloped in immensity,
so overwhelmed
we almost succumb—
we don’t ask why
we keep our footing.
Yetta
What once was a tragedy is now an anecdote
my husband shares: he never knew
his grandfather had a sister
who was beheaded by a train.
He never heard anyone whisper her name,
visit her grave,
never caught a glimpse of pain.
But Yetta appears on his family tree.
He and I are laughing in the kitchen--
how could he have been so unaware,
illiterate to ancestral despair.
People may think it’s cruel to laugh,
after all, a little girl died
while crossing a street, but I find solace
knowing griefs weaken and dull,
erode as generations wash ashore.
Something as shocking as a severed skull,
which surely must have shattered a home,
even that has been whittled to dinner talk
as we speak of Yetta and pass the salt.
Jane Schapiro is the author of the 2020 Nautilus Book Award Winner Warbler (Kelsay Books, 2020), Let The Wind Push Us Across (Antrim House 2017), Tapping This Stone (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 1995) and the nonfiction book Inside a Class Action: The Holocaust and the Swiss Banks (University of Wisconsin, 2003). Mrs. Cave’s House won the 2012 Sow’s Ear Poetry Chapbook competition. Her work has appeared in The American Scholar, Black Warrior Review, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and Verse Daily.