Just Another Courageous Woman

finding pieces of the picture

There is no one left alive
who can tell your story
fully; truly as it was.
But I will continue
to try to find
pieces of the picture;
like the pieces of yourself
that were left behind
as you sent your surviving 
children ahead to safety
in a strange, far-away land.

You, barely 23 years old. 
Just another courageous
woman, story untold.

There was an attempted telling
I overheard in childhood,
though you were not
mentioned by name,
and crucial elements
(I have found in re-searching)
were lost along the way.
(Like that telephone game
where the further down the line
the message is passed,
the less it resembles that
which was originally said.)
I heard that your children
(the ones not dead) 
arrived upon these shores
as orphans of poverty; 
parents too poor
to care for them.
I remember wondering 
how someone could
send their children away. 
I did not understand then
that there is poor,
then there is pogrom poor.

It is one thing to beg for bread,
another to beg for the right
to exist at all. 

You would be sad to see 
this is still too often true.
Dehumanizing 
conspiracy theories
may not be new, 
but they are indeed alive and kicking;
still treacherous and tricking.
Lace- veiled genocidal gossip,
time bombs ticking. 
Mythologies creating madness. 

As I sift through
histories of family,
ethnicity, and our 
larger humanity,
I wonder, amidst your
experienced atrocities, 
from where did you
gather your strength and hope?
How great or small was your
capacity to cope?
Did you love trees, sunshine, and flowers?
Did you dance, sing, or write anything?
How did you carry or transmute your grief?
With whom did you spend your last hours? 

Though you were gone
long before my arrival,
I sense in myself 
your tenacious survival.
Here with me now
in my bones, blood, and breath; 
Dearest Jennie, you live
beyond Kishinev's death. 

~for my Great-Great Grandmother, Jennie, 1880-1947.
Survivor of the Kishinev massacre of 1903.