I think of my mother’s family, circa 1936 — folding Warsaw and Berlin in their steamer trunks, beneath prayer shawls, pictures of the dead. That, shipped to Honduras, they learned to speak new languages the way they learned to eat tortilla after years of bread. That they built history in walls, shelves for books, windows framing a street that wasn’t Stuttgart or Odessa. There would be a table for their meal, a box of charity. Candles would stop them getting lost. That all of us need an entrance, even here, a post on which to pin a prayer, a door to creak when prophets enter, or when angels. That all of us carry home like a steerage ticket crumpled in our hands.
“Limen” (under the title “Poem on the Dedication of the Hillel House, at Washington College, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore”) was printed as a limited-edition broadside by the Literary House Press at the Rose O’Neill Literary House, 2011.
Jehanne Dubrow is the author of five collections of poetry, including, most recently, “The Arranged Marriage” (University of New Mexico Press, 2015).
