By Cynthia Barnard –
Aunty Ann always wore
lovely dresses with long sleeves,
even on that sunny day in August
when I sat next to her
at the picnic table,
soft yellow silk slid up her arm,
and I glimpsed the numbers.
What’s that, Aunty Ann?
Oh, just something for grown-ups,
Shayne meydele, she said,
gentle fingers kissing my cheeks.
Go and play.
And so she blessed me
with a few more years
of childhood
Until that day in fourth grade,
somewhere on the cusp between
only myself and the larger world,
when I learned about
the six million
and began my search for understanding—
which, of course,
I have never found.
Cynthia Bernard is an Ashkenazi Jewish woman in her early seventies, a long-time classroom teacher who has worked in schools, a juvenile detention facility, and adult jails. She lives and writes on a hill overlooking the ocean, about 25 miles south of San Francisco. Her poetry, short fiction, and essays have been published in many journals and anthologies in the United States and internationally. She was selected by Western Rivers Conservancy to serve as the Poet-Protector of Deer Creek Falls in the northern Sierra Nevada foothills.
