Marc Chagall
They made a crime
of my Jewishness.
But it was love
that determined
my life as a Jew.
I painted
the ghettos
of Moscow and Vitebsk
the songs and laughter
a pogrom
might displace --
fiddlers in the air
and dancing maids.
Beauty was my poise
inside despair
in a sky so blue
only a wash of violet
could caress the paterfamilias
it held
--the charms of a peasant
dancing above the house--
with one heel cocked,
and his blue knee bent.
But war made a mockery of my
aesthetic.
Though each noble misery
adorned by light
each latticework
each horse
each shining night--
Seemed entirely
undisturbed
by history’s
indifference.
And love lived richly
in poverty’s house
amid the floating shapes
of whimsy and pain.
The face above the village
of a fiddler
of green
turning silence into
joy
to anoint
the rain.
Though in the White Crucifixion
there was something else.
--How a war
against the real
could usurp
a people.
That only a monster
Could machine such a fate,
making ashes
of the Shekinah
and the hope
that adorns
love’s holy face.
So I painted the Kristallnacht.
as if the glass were still breaking.
With the pale Jew,
Jesus,
on the cross
of our pain.
