i saw your words.
red paint pulsating with your one-track message
bet you wielded that brush with
conviction.
i’m imagining you now, how you plunged the paintbrush
down
into a bucket of the cheap hue
the scent of acrylic making the colors go soft around you.
did they bleed into each other?
and i watch you drag the letters down
making your “j” twisted and deformed
“Jews are not wanted here.”
you knew eventually a Jewish girl would find herself confronted
by your grotesque calligraphy…
her world would go dark
and the quick-brush cadence of her musical mind would
mute.
she would recall the stench of gas
the slap-thrash commands of a man in uniform
because hate likes to echo through
pieces
of
space
and the colors around her would go soft
and bleed into each other.
Hannah Ascher is a 17-year-old poet and singer-songwriter. She is a member of Sinai Temple and a rising senior at Brentwood School. She wrote this poem after seeing a sign on a college campus that said, in splattered red paint, ‘You can’t be a Zionist and an environmentalist.’ She recently released a folk-pop album called “Making Space.”
