Of Blessed Memory

            After a photograph of Holocaust survivor Flora Singer

by Marianne Szlyk

The sun bleaches the slats
of a black and white fence.
Small statues bask

in sunlight, not too warm
on this October day
just before leaves turn.

You stand in the space
cleared from matchstick woods,
a place far from home,

the woods you looked out to
from the Catholic orphanage,
the woods you wandered

while in hiding. Surrounded
by the frog musicians
of Grimm’s fairy tales,

your back to the ash leaves
about to turn 

the color of old bruises,

you have no more stories to tell.
You look out to the camera.
Now you are home.

* * * * *

Here is a biographical sketch of Flora Singer: https://www.ushmm.org/remember/holocaust-survivors/volunteers/flora-singer. 

Marianne Szlyk is a professor of English and Reading at Montgomery College. She also edits The Song Is... a blog-zine for poetry and prose inspired by music (especially jazz). Her full-length book, On the Other Side of the Window, is now available from Pski's Porch. Her second chapbook, I Dream of Empathy, is available on Amazon. Her poems have appeared in of/with, bird's thumb, Loch Raven Review, Cactifur, Mad Swirl, Setu, Solidago, Red Bird Chapbook's Weekly Read, Mermaid Mirror, and Resurrection of a Sunflower, an anthology of work responding to Vincent Van Gogh's art. She invites you to stop by her blog-zine and perhaps even submit some poems: http://thesongis.blogspot.com