So now you make an entrance,
never my ghost,
the partisans’ poet, their luck till the end.
Now you waver like a daylit candle
seventy-three years burning
and not done with memory yet.
You came up from nothing but words,
hardworking Hirshke,
dreamed forests within walls
and new roads from the forests
and left your inheritance of the dispossessed—
the words for going on with.
Blood or lead, a song must outlive its singer
or it dims bitter in a land of milk and honey,
crawls to a shadow among skyscrapers and walkups.
Beyond the break of the pines, I still hear you singing,
in my mouth sometimes,
sometimes in your own.

© 2019 Sonya Taaffe