By Jane Schapiro –
Even my father, the optimist, harbored a just-in-case.
He never let on, but after his death
my sisters and I found gold coins in his drawer.
We never knew he had a just-in-case,
had inherited the dread of pogroms and camps
from his parents, their parents,
on down the line.
We divided the coins for our own just-in-case:
a source for escape should hatred explode.
Months can pass and I forget the stash,
but last night, after listening to a victim’s account,
how she and her girlfriends, high on drugs,
had been dancing to a D.J. on a Negev field,
just dancing arm-in-arm
in a percussive daze,
boundless, whole
when the sky split as the sun rose,
and missiles and bullets tore through the dark
and gunmen burst from behind barbed wire
dissolving the ground to a swamp of blood,
how she escaped but not her friend—
when she finished her story, a man raised his hand,
“why were you dancing so close to the line?”—
I counted my coins.
Jane Schapiro is an American poet and nonfiction writer, living in Fairfax, Virginia.
