Stowaway

This is a poem written on the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Day 2015

Stowaway

What should we do now?
Do our acts of remembrance
merely complete our amnesia?

At one and the same time

as we remember what we know was lost

do we erase what has been forgotten 

in the rituals of commemoration?

We only make room on our monuments 

for the names we remember.

Does memory also include the possibility,

at least, of what cannot be remembered?

At the memorial for what we lost,
the order of service, the list of the lost,

is a manifest that ignores the stowaways,
disregards the unregistered and illegal,
articulates what is a matter of record only
and, as it must, leaves what is unsayable

unsaid: on one hand we briefly touch
our outstretched fingertips to our friend's 

as they fall forever out of reach; on the other,
we didn't even know that they existed,
so perfect is their annihilation.
What other Adams crumbled back to dust
while God's Sistine digit reached out to us,
and in the end failed to stop even our fall?

But weren't we all stowaways once?
Rather than just remember
what must not be forgotten
- floral tributes solemnly laid
on the tops of stone monuments -
perhaps we should not forget to mourn 

the incalculable loss 
of what cannot now be remembered.

Unseal the tomb. See
that all we share with its occupant 

who stood next to us on previous occasions
is an emptiness that we can crawl inside
to curl up in alone, hiding 

in the borrowed shadows of their sepulchre 

on our own private journey 

in the vessel it makes for us. 

The waters we are embarked upon
are dark and unforgiving, grief strewn, 

and in the inevitable end

we don't know who else clings
to the wreckage in the night,
or who has succumbed already to the cold
to sink at last into their pit of private terror
without a trace, without ever being known, 
without even having the chance of being remembered.
The light of day does not reveal the depths,
it only reveals the debris, only the jetsam
around which we locked our rigid fingers,
as we turned ourselves into objects to survive,
the debris from which we now make
our grim reckoning of loss,
and delude ourselves we are better prepared
for the next storm,

for it is only in the limitless, inaccessible depths,
where the sunken bodies eventually come to rest,
that the truth is known.

So let us not just commemorate
what we know of our loss.
Let us remember
that we will never know its full extent.
Let us not pretend
we are prepared for the future,
all epaulettes and medals
mumbling pious voodoo at the helm.
Let us now think about
those now living that we overlook today,
and render assistance
to the refugee and to the stowaway,
no matter who they are
or where they're from or what they flee
and fill up to overflowing
now our empty memory
as the only way to make up
for what was lost without a trace.