Brave

I try to write a poem each year for Holocaust Memorial Day. This is this year's attempt.

On this occasion I was thinking about the thousands of elderly survivors of genocide living today in Israel. There are higher rates of poverty among holocaust survivors than among the general population of similar age.

I wanted to write something about the sense of embarrassment, shame and guilt felt by those who survive genocide and the communities in which they live.

Brave

Fighting may be brave,
but dying is braver.
Not dying gun in hand,
charging into a fight you picked
to find a death you crave
"facing fearful odds
for the ashes of your fathers
and the temples of their gods,"
a death that garlands your grave
with glory, but dying in your bed
bombed while you sleep, instead,
without the consolation of purpose,
or while awake, sleep walking
towards a common fate whose name
redacts your own in all the books of men,
and braver still than these is life
when all you love is dead,
and just to breathe is to drown
in decades of air their grave becomes,
so complete was the disposal of all trace,
and when everyone thinks you are a coward
(and what's worse, doesn't say it to your face)
and you yourself think you are a coward
just for surviving, then to live
is the bravest thing of all.