Because so many of you have written that you bought the book, I was surprised that Amazon wrote me that they had zero sales.  So I went to facebook to see if anyone else wrote that they had the book, and discovered that Ira had been hinting to me to put a poem on facebook as a sample. and if people liked it they would buy the book.  Here’s the poem I chose:

Absence

“What are you looking for?”

we’d ask Mother, as she rummaged

a cupboard or a drawer or the phone book.

“My lost youth,” she’d answer

absent-mindedly, having forgotten

whatever had occupied her mind

when she first began to search.

The bombs, the soldiers, the streets

covered with bodies, the story of the children

smashed against the wall, her babies

washed down the drain in the bathtub in Danzig,

they were always

right there in the cupboard, the drawer,

the book next to the telephone.

The interesting background was that this was the last poem I wrote for this book, and I had in mind my grandchildren and all the children in this war who have indelibly been scarred.  It was the first time I realized how much my mother had been through.