Heritage Month
I have this feeling now as a Jewess
That I need to use my skills as an Artist and
Poet to make myself heard Living right here in
Cape Town, South Africa.
I feel the forces of anti-Semitism creeping once
again in different, Colours, shapes and forms All
around us. Even in the institution where I learn.
I hear the people on the radio
Raving about Heritage Month
Well I am here trying my utmost to hold onto mine.
It is my magic wand to help get me where I want to be in this world.
There are many different heritages which make up this society.
Many range of traditions and cultures.
We cannot all be the same.
And need to be proud and honest about who we are.
And not hide behind the approaching gloomy
clouds, which have started gathering across Table Mountain.
Please G-d I am able, to continue to shine, as
myself Through what’s left, of the rays of the
sun, moon and star light.
Abigail Sarah Bagraim
BroKeN DoLLS
Two little girls played ‘dolls’ together
Carefully dressed them and gave them names
They carried them, cradled them and put them to rest
They played no other games
Two grown-up girls
Now playing ‘house’
Not with each other
But each with a spouse
Two women became mothers
To real little dolls of their own
But these they would care for forever
Even when they were fully grown
They loved them and nurtured them
And saw they were dressed
They fed them and bathed them
And put them to rest …
… Two older women
Somehow coming through
Knowing that dolls can be broken
And dreams can be too
Two women understanding
That though they had tried their best
It was their precious, damaged dolls
That would be the ultimate test
Two women who have realised
That it is life itself that’s the game
And the more we search for answers
The less there is to blame
Two people who have recognized
That we are all really puppets at best
And yet still have to learn to lay
Our broken dolls to rest
Knowing that every one of us
Is as vulnerable as each little toy
And as we bury our sadness and hurt
We are fortified by extracting the joy
Charlotte Cohen
In Muizenberg cemetery, January 2016 1
Here they are,
face up to the Capricorn sky,
biblical wanderers on heathen sand.
My clan. Who shall visit them when we are gone?
I read the stones of the windswept acre
beneath the lowering peaks.
Muizenberg, once the world’s most southerly shtetl,
refuge from a bullying Europe.
Goldstein, Levy, Rifkin, Braude,
See the faces in the ghetto streets.
bargaining across the kosher counters,
atoning for their sins at Yom Kippur,
burying their dead.
All gone. The mezuzahs from the doorframes;
their homes occupied by Christians, Moslems,
all the nations of my country; at last.
Here, Grandpa Barney, in his heavy suit,
dead when I was nine.
I don’t know if he wore a hearing aid
but he seemed to miss out on much that was
going on around him.
Granny and her Yorkshire sisters
called him ‘the Russian’. Behind his back.
Granny. The woman in my life,
as we like to say of grannies. And she was.
Three sons, dead before they were thirty.
How could she bear the sorrow
and still offer the world that sweet smile?
As she lay dying I prayed for the last time.
I miss the old thing.
Marcus is the only son here.
I finger the words on the Table Mountain sandstone;
‘Mordechai ben Dov, died 1937’.
TB, it was said, from a kick in a rugger match.
How proud they were, these immigrants, of their studious lawyer boy.
And a plaque for uncle Archie, Dr Archibald Haft,
cavalier, careless; ‘so many girls were interested’, mom said.
Buried in another desert far up the continent.
At war, showing up for his parents’ adopted land.
But where number three, the first born, the violinist,
dead in a lunatic asylum?
Nothing but a blank wall when we spoke his name.
Joshua.
Thus it was a hundred years ago.
Dad lies near the car park where, on summer Sundays
kinsmen from London, Sydney or San Diego,
wander the menhir-lined avenues with nostalgic eye,
pose a stone of remembrance on their namesakes –
no flowers, please, do not brighten this dreary place –
their bored children impatient for the beach.
I hear his voice at odd moments, ‘Denis, Denis, Denis…’,
as if from the grave. Is he asking where his wife is?
For unlike the other pairings in this place, she does not lie alongside.
Did she wish to reserve the plot next door, they inquired.
Mom didn’t ring back.
Lil and Phil; couldn’t face another fifty years in his presence,
much less an eternity.
Dear Lil, no need to plant a stone, we talk about you still.
But you didn’t widow well.
‘I’d like a nice, loving man to hug,’ you said, in your faded pink pyjamas,
‘no funny business…just…a companion.’
You went without fuss. When the maid came in with the Andrew’s Liver Salts
a library book lay open on your chest.
The day before your 89th, it was, though your passport said 81.
And Michael. Never Mike.
It is decided that eleven-year-old me should not be at the funeral.
I don’t say goodbye to my big broer,
do not shovel three clods of earth on his corpse,
do not see him covered up in his last place,
nor my father prostrate himself on the coffin
as it’s lowered into the six feet.
I don’t know how many and who were there,
who spoke up for his life, brief as it was but a life all the same,
other than the rabbi delivering his form of words.
I never cried for him.
I was ashamed to have survived.
Sad to say, I won’t be joining them.
But I’ll be there on the mountain top, the peak on the left
if you stand with your back to the sea.
Denis Herbstein
Epilogue from “Love to Hate”
A scarecrow strides across the mielie fields.
He’s a giant, head and shoulders above the green stalks,
their hair moving softly in the early morning breeze.
His face is gaunt, burnt, fried, almost, by the sun.
Wild untidy wisps of long silver hair, once fair,
stick out from under the battered felt hat, its former colour unrecognisable.
His jeans are torn and dusty, sagging over a flat backside, scrawny thighs
and stick legs.
He moves from green fields to stubble,
worn velskoen crunching on the dead stalks,
pale blue eyes narrowed against the glare of the rising sun.
His movements are jerky, agitated, mouth set in a grimace of pain.
On and on over fields now cracked and dry,
occasionally littered with the bones of old livestock.
And in the distance as though following in his footsteps,
is the skeletal black figure of Giant Death with his scythe,
slashing at a non-existent mielie crop.
The gap narrows. Scarecrow panics, knowing his time is almost up.
His face is wet with sweat, a greenish pallor.
The sweat runs down his cheeks,
darkens his white-blond beard and moustache.
He rolls his eyes, whites showing prominently.
Death blows his horn.
Simultaneously there’re seismic upheavals from the other ends of the earth,
the forces of nature, seething, writhing, bubbling.
An underwater earthquake, post-Christmas day destruction.2
Giant waves moving at an unbelievable rate, over a distance of 1600 km,
a single wave, 160 km long, travelling at a speed of 965 km per hour.
Inconceivable to the human mind, yet experienced – the nightmare of nightmares.
Hundreds of thousands of people mowed down in its path.
An international disaster affecting visitors from
forty different countries, locals from fourteen different nations.
Our man-made disasters pale into insignificance.
Besides, it is not even man, sophisticated with technology, who pre-empts the cataclysm,
but the animals including the small Asian elephants
who trumpet, call and agitate at least five hours before the tsunami breaks.
Then the horror of the aftermath.
Up to ten years to pick up the pieces.
Meanwhile children are orphaned and abducted
and man fights the realities of cholera and starvation.
Waves of terror and death.
Pamela Heller-Stern
NOTES
- The above (author’s copyright) is from a collection of Denis Herbstein’s poems entitled No one to contradict me, Dionysus Books, 2016.
- On 26 December 2004, an earthquake off the west coast of Sumatra caused massive underwater upheavals resulting in tsunamis affecting Sri Lanka, Phuket in Thailand, Banda Aceh in Indonesia, parts of India, Andaman and the Nicobar Islands.
