By Matt Hohner
Tree of Life Synagogue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
October 27, 2018
“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
–Theodor Adorno
The dead keep piling up and all I have are poems
to wrap them in. Pockmarks across synagogue walls
are a new font in a familiar language I refuse to utter.
Men have begun again to speak in tongues syntaxed
by phonemes of caliber and clip capacity: diction I
will not assemble into sentences; sounds I cannot make
into words. What color, the stripes being woven like old
narratives into new camp pajamas? How many stars
asterisk prayers into the bluest night? There is no
metaphor for what I cannot abide; no pentameter
for the sound of earth falling from the hands of love
into a freshly-filled grave. My iambs are a pair
of backwards-turned boots in the stirrups of a riderless
horse. We measure the inarticulate grammar of fear
in the steady metronome of newsfeed updates,
punctuate the lulls between carnage with promises
enjambed in the wind. Cover my eyes with verses
if you must. Bribe the ferryman with curses and dust.
A poet’s contract is blood-inked, bone-stamped,
ratified eternal at the frontier where hope kisses rust.
Winner, 2019 Doolin Writers’ Weekend International Poetry Prize (Ireland). Published in The Irish Times February 27, 2019. From At the Edge of a Thousand Years (out of print, Jacar Press 2024).
The Importance of Arts, Culture & The Creative Process
When the horrific massacre of Jews attending the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania occurred, it was the latest in a series of increasingly monstrous acts by White American males using assault rifles against unarmed citizens. I'd written poems about similar gun violence already, but this act resonated on several levels. On a personal level, the act hit home for me, because my wife's family, Italian Catholics, once lived in the mostly Jewish Squirrel Hill neighborhood where the event took place. They, like I, immediately thought of our Jewish friends, but on a global and historic level, we were confronted by the dark shadow of the Holocaust, and with how far backward our nation had fallen on that day.
I knew I had to write about the event; as a poet who celebrates the beauty and wonders of our natural and made world, I also feel I have an obligation to use my gifts to confront evil and injustice in all of their forms, as best I can, whenever possible. I realized, through tears and gut-sick and sobs, that the best way "into" that poem was to start with my inability to make poetic sense of it, but also to declare my outrage and unwavering resolve to run towards the emotional, psychological, social, and spiritual wreckage at ground zero of such moments, and use my words to offer some semblance of healing and hope, and to bear witness so that future generations will know that someone cared.
A few months after this poem was published in The Irish Times online, Rabbi Jeffrey Meyer, who was present when the attack on his congregation occurred, contacted me on social media to ask if he could use it as part of the first Yom Kippur activities since the attack at Tree Of Life that following fall. There is no greater and humbling honor for a poet than knowing that his words written for and about healing after a terrible event were heard and read by the people who experienced it.
A year after that, a poet friend of mine here in Baltimore told me that his rabbi had just read my poem during service at his synagogue. Apparently, my poem had found its way onto a national database for rabbis to use for activities at their synagogues. A poem that I had written as an intensely personal and solitary act to try to make sense of the ugliness that sometimes accompanies the beauty of living on Earth now belongs to the world. If anyone asks me what poetry does, I will tell them this: poetry bears witness, celebrates life, unites, heals, and lives beyond us.
What was the inspiration for your creative work?
Historically, my political and humanitarian inspiration comes from everyone who has stood up to the forces of destruction to declare their universal right to exist freely. Poetically, Sam Hamill, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka come to mind most often, but that’s just a handful. I could list many, many more.
Tell us something about the natural world that you love and don’t wish to lose. What are your thoughts on the kind of world we are leaving for the next generation?
Thinking locally for a moment, I want the next generation to enjoy a Chesapeake Bay in which one can walk across enormous shoals of oysters, just like those that the first Europeans encountered when they sailed up its beautiful, brackish, pristine, teeming waters. Copy and paste that wish across our ever-threatened world, and specify it for every place struggling to exist under the relentless voraciousness of humans.
