The Sand Hill Review               http://www.stanford.edu/~sandhill              2006

Passage

I can’t believe I was nine fifty years ago.
What did Mrs. Colbath think when she huddled us
in the school hallway, our frail arms poking up
against the bomb? Or then Miss Downey, whose
Catholic wedding mass I attended, and on whose walls
we pinned our paper Thanksgiving turkeys, telling
a pilgrim tale long since revised. That tan and red
math book, its wise single page explaining how to
write a check. Thus knowledge carries forward
(the way I still add, as if out loud in my head,
a column of figures). Which summer did I lay
on the grass, looking up at clouds, with Judy
and Jeanette? Grampa had already died--the rough
and smooth peach marble stone at his gravesite,
carved; the trellis and sandbox he’d built,
falling into disrepair. My parents, calling me
into the living room in my little nightgown to see,
by special permission and with privilege, film on TV
of buckets of gold removed from human teeth
at Buchenwald. “You’re old enough to know.”
 
Muriel Karr