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 a writer living in Northern VA. She has published three volumes of poetry and a book of nonfiction (Inside a Class Action:The Holocaust and the Swiss Banks: Univ. of Wisconsin Press). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including The American Scholar, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, Verse Daily. Schapiro lives in Fairfax, Virginia. You can find more of her writing at www.janeschapiro.com.
“Just In Case” was first published by The Mid-Atlantic Review special section on The Jewish Experience.
Art by Batnadiv HaKarmi
