Jed Myers

January 30, 2022

“On a Day of Remembrance” by Jed MyersPosted by

Jed Myers

ON A DAY OF REMEMBRANCE

International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 2022

Let’s remember how they thought
they were finally cleaning things up.
Taking care of the rodent problem.

Not strange. The same way
we had the man spray downstairs
when moths had invaded the carpet.

You know how your scalp will itch
when you hear there are lice. Let’s
remember this, inheritance meant

to make our skin crawl at the chance
of a spider, a scorpion, ants.
Older than ancient. Ancestral.

Remembrance? Let it spread across
every checkpoint and wired wall,
to touch all our swatting hands.

—from Poets Respond
January 30, 2022

__________

Jed Myers: “Another International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and another chance for us to grasp or miss the fact of it being part of our nature to carry out genocides. It’s of dire importance that we remember this is not specific to the Germans or the Jews, but specific to humans. This is the challenge within us. It still waits to be met.” (web)

Rattle Logo

June 30, 2019

“American Border Study: Two Bodies in a River” by Jed MyersPosted by

Jed Myers

AMERICAN BORDER STUDY: TWO BODIES IN A RIVER

Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his daughter, Valeria, Rio Grande, Matamoros, Mexico

We’ll recall her small arm on his neck.
We’ll forget them there in the shallows.

We wonder at the black cloth they share.
We don’t get it was how he held her.

We see clearly her short red pants.
We miss the pink disposable diaper.

We note the bamboo stalks on the shore.
We grow our bamboo along the link fence.

We see sun in the river’s slow ripples.
We have no fierce current here in the frame.

We’re touched their dark heads wind up together.
We are spared their still-eyed stare.

We’re shocked the camera shot them in the back.
We’re not especially surprised.

We’re living the lives they might have.
We haven’t been breathing water.

We understand it’s father and daughter.
We don’t have our noses in the mud.

—from Poets Respond
June 30, 2019

__________

Jed Myers: “For all its shocking immediacy, an image of tragedy on our southern border seems to embody our burned-out distance. The drowned father and little daughter are casualties of our country’s deep currents of fear. The truth that we’re all Americans north and south is lost in the hubbub of nationhood. We take the river as border, denying our deeper unity. I hope my poem holds and conveys the embarrassment of our self-distancing.” (web)

Rattle Logo

March 7, 2017

“Jewish Cemetery Night” by Jed MyersPosted by

Jed Myers

JEWISH CEMETERY NIGHT

Those headstones at Mount Carmel, each
must weigh more than a man, and taken
a couple of men a piece to bring down,
one then the next, nearly a hundred,
into the night. This was a team,
I imagine—together they pressed
their shoulders and chests and cheeks
and palms in uncanny brief intimacies
into the names of women and men
who walked the Northeast Philly streets
before these raiders were born. I see
the impression of some part of loving
father remain for minutes embossed
in the pad of flesh under a thumb. Another’s
brow is stamped with the Hebrew letter
aleph that stands for the first of the Ten
Commandments. I hear the men grunt
in unison on the heave after three.

And the gratification, the bonding
these guys, I’m sure they’re young, must be
able to feel, with what they’ve achieved—
what lives have they been leading? Is this
as close to a shared heatedly held
meaning as they can get, faceless
amalgam of the dead under their feet
and available to be blamed? The hugs
these topplers must’ve exchanged, shined
by their sweat in the moonlight. What lives
led to this? That it was just common
hate could uplift them? Don’t they drink
their pints after work in the tavern, cheer
and curse the game over the bar? Doesn’t it
keep their hides secure round their hearts
and their eyes off each other? I think
it’s their secret aloneness does it, down
in that dark dark as the dirt.

—Poets Respond
March 7, 2017

[download audio]

__________

Jed Myers: “We witness a terrifying upsurge in multiple dimensions of us-and-them thinking and associated destructive enactments. Judgments won’t help, but seeking to understand just might. The news of another assault on cemetery headstones can serve as entry into empathic-intuitive exploration.” (website)

Rattle Logo