DNA

June 4, 2023

CHARLESTON, WV

Half of me, according to the twisted
strands of deoxyribonucleic acid,
has its roots in Liskovo, which would be
a simple matter were there not towns
by that name in Poland and Belarus,
and none in Lithuania, the language of my genes.

All of this is preparatory to my visit
next week to the city where my mother,
grandparents and great grandparents
are buried, and my intended first sight
of their gravestones, my first true touching
of a family denied me by my birth
and adoption that severed all but
that which my genes kept hidden
until cold stones were all that was left.

I will place a stone on each marker,
and take a quick photo, hoping
that in a strange way the Navajo elders
were right, and I will carry away
a small bit of their souls, which will
fill a small corner of the deep chasm
that is the me I was never meant to know.

April 27, 2023

THE WEIGHT OF MOURNING

The weight of mourning defies precise measurement,
and all of the rules of mathematics fail in an attempt.
Grief rejects being placed on scales, there is never
a moment of pure equilibrium, only a teetering
that always threatens to bring it all down in a heap.
A million who are nameless and faceless is an agony
and yet eighty thousand with names on white walls
of the ancient synagogue in Prague seem
to weigh as heavy or heavier on the heart,
and the youngest of those taken are the heaviest
a burden almost too great to bear,
no lighter for our freely flowing tears.
And yet a woman, nameless, faceless
and dead a dozen years, who I knew as my mother
but nothing more, save odd facts that insured
it would be all I would ever know, that woman
was a crushing burden, but one I had to bear alone
and did, if barely, until the moment
when by twist of fate and DNA, she had a name
and soon thereafter a face, and as I stared at her,
as I stared, too, at the mirror, the hole she left,
that emptiness grew vast and heavy, and I
must now struggle not to collapse beneath it.

First appeared in Peacock Journal, February 2017
https://peacockjournal.com/louis-faber-three-poems/

April 9, 2023

ANCESTRY

It shouldn’t be so easy to forget
where your ancestors came from, why
they left their homes, traveled to
a new place where they might not be welcomed
but took the chance for a better future or just
to avoid the horrors of where they were.
It is a part of your DNA, yours were
the” other” then, but yours came and made
a new life, as your grandparents
told you repeatedly until you covered
your ears, the story an earworm
you only wanted to avoid again.
Now you sit in your pleasant home, with
food on your table, and decry those
who appear at the border as your
ancestors once did, seeking escape
from terror or poverty, so it seems
your forgetting is complete,
your ancestors are consigned to history.

September 3, 2022

REAR VIEW MIND

I spent too much time looking
backward, looking into the past,
looking into the mirror
to frame a dream history
of my desires and fears.
He called one morning, left
a message, “Mother died,
more details will follow.”
A mother his by birth,
mine by legal act.
I should have felt stunned
anger, I said quietly to myself
he’s cocky, has issues, and went
about momentary mourning.
That is the psyche of the adoptee who
was never family, always an adjunct.
Later my antediluvian dreams
gave way under a torrent
of deoxyribonucleic acid rain.
She who I imagined in the mirror
took name, took shape from
and old yearbook, offered
a history, a family, a heritage.
When I knelt at her grave
she told me her story
in hushed tones, or was it
the breeze in the pines on the hill
overlooking the Kanawha?
I bid her farewell that day,
placed a pebble on her headstone,
stroked the cold marble
and mourned an untouched mother.

June 10, 2022

ANCESTRY

Children have an innate sense
of their ancestry.
I was a child of the city
it’s streets my paths, always
under the watchful eye
of my warden – mother.

Dirt was to be avoided
at all possible cost,
so I never dug my hands
into the fertile soil of my
village in the heart of Lithuania,
or tasted the readying harvest
that dirt would remember.

I never stole a nip of poitin
only the Manischewitz which,
in our home, masqueraded
as wine fit for drinking. It is only
now in my second childhood
that the ancestry very deep
in my DNA has finally found
purchase in my mind and soul.

January 15, 2022

AMD ODE

You didn’t have to go, you know
I did enjoy having you around,
and I am sorely missing you now.

They said the odds of you
leaving, of even planning a departure
were small, but what did they know.

They didn’t know that I
had traits that would make
your departure more likely.

They didn’t say that once
the word was uttered, a departure
was no doubt inevitable, a when not if.

I’d like to think you’ll come back
but everyone agrees you cannot
absent some sort of miracle.

But at least, for now, I still
have your twin, and I will treasure
him as long as I can see to do so.

December 25, 2021

CHRISTMAS

It isn’t my first Christmas
although almost so, that
part of me hidden for half
a century, its twisted discovery
filling a hole that I never
knew existed, yet always knew.

This is the strangest Christmas,
a time of gathering, now
in isolation, only pixels
and prayers on a too flat screen,
and it is hard, in times
of want and suffering, to recall
why we celebrate this day.

A child was born, and now
countless others will be,
and it is only the children
that recall his message, and
truly understand peace.

September 21, 2021

A LITTLE DRUMMER

It seems less than fair that as a child
I was Jewish to the core, adopted, yes,
but certainly fully Jewish and not merely
by maternal lineage which would suffice.

Christmas was alien to me then, even
when I left Judaism behind, a shadow
that would follow me closely into
my Buddhist practice and life.

But DNA made a liar of so many,
my birth mother, the adoption agency
and my adoptive parents, for I know
my Judaism was only half of me.

So now I can enjoy Christmas
and other holidays, listen anew
to “The Little Drummer Boy”
and relish the irony of my new life.

For I have aged, as has my wife,
and when they sing “Do you hear
what I hear?” she sadly says
“not any longer I don’t” and then,

“Do you see what I see?” and I
must admit I do so only barely
and the doctors assure me that
soon enough I may say no as well.

August 24, 2021

LIAR

It is a strange feeling to discover that you
have been made a liar by your own DNA.

For years I was Jewish to the core, half
at least Sephardic, Portuguese, and that
not merely extracted but fully blooded.

My diet at Passover expanded greatly,
no longer dictated by Northerners who
easily banned that which they did not grow.

But inquisitiveness got the better of me,
and I learned, and disbelieved, that only
half of me was Jewish, half a polygot
of other faiths, no Sephardic in sight.

It wasn’t as painful as you might imagine,
for I had given up my Judaism well
before the discovery, so what was lost
was no longer mine by claim or right.

It is strange feeling to discover that you
have been made a whole person by your DNA.

April 7, 2021

A TWISTED ROAD

Walking down the helical
road, untwisting as you go
you discover places
you never imaginged
visiting, nothing
like the path you
thought you knew well.

Stop and claim
your new heritage,
find yourself
on an alien map,
bury yourself in books
of new and ancient history.

Pause here and consider
a King of Scotland,
knights and lords,
in the far distance
know that you claim
a link to a man
so honored that he
died by hanging, but
was then beheaded
and drawn and quartered.

Too late to unswab
your cheek, so simply
enjoy your ride.