Image: © Charles Eastwood
Salt, parsley, matzah
I am tying my apron when he wanders in.
He must be impressed, my elter zeyde,
because instead of moving on again, he sits
as if inviting me to make him coffee;
I pull tight on my apron strings, imagine
his approval, his apron shop, its peeling paint
yet another diminishing space proscribed
into a side street, ripe with the musk
of horses stomping on soot-blackened setts.
But this is where they all come on their way
to whatever afterlife is allowed to them:
rabbis and grocers, toolmakers, storesmen,
chambermaids, undertakers and butchers,
their aprons, tarnished with gore or boot black,
will surely outlive them as hand-me-downs,
chattels taken as bankrupt stock, or theft,
discarded skins enduring on the hooks
of grubby basement walls, hiding behind doors.
I try to brighten things up a little:
organise his stock according to class, colour,
size and origin; he needs to be organised,
encouraged to put down roots, so I sweep
and scrub the grime from the flagstones,
erect shelves of sweet yellow pine to evoke
Carpathian forests where you could still be lost
for days, and I keep his racks nearly bare
like a Gucci store – less to carry if we must flee.
Finally, he speaks, and he talks about the Czar,
how it was clear that trouble was coming to Kiev;
in Bialystok bones got broken in hands and bodies,
people were clubbed to death with rifles, nails
driven into their heads; how it went on for days.
The English too hate us, he says, but here at least
they respect hard work, a fair price for good cloth,
don’t always demand bribes, and anyway,
everyone is going to America.
There’s no guarantee that we will die in the place where we were born,
yet the yellow stars burn everywhere the same.
I come upon him again in a garden encircled
by high stone walls and iron gates, where swifts gather at twilight
sharing news from abroad, ravens bother with salvation tracts,
and robins in their scarlet aprons turn the soil above his head.
‘Is it always like this?’ I ask.
‘Always’, he answers.
____
David Canning won the Ginkgo AONB Prize for Best Poem of the British Landscape in 2023. He has published two poetry collections, An Essex Parish (2015) and The Celestial Spheres (2020) which was shortlisted in the Poetry Book Awards 2023and in 2021, Jim-Jam-Julie, an illustrated children’s story in verse. He has been long-listed in the National Poetry Competition, and twice shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. His writing has appeared in the Sentinel Quarterly Literary Review, Places of Poetry, Magma Poetry, Wet Grain and UKClimbing.com. In 2020 and 2021, David served on the judging panel for the Boardman Tasker prize for mountain literature.