I THINK EMILY DICKINSON
WOULD HAVE BEEN POLITICAL TODAY
by Sharon Olds
Page 12
Someone asked me today about the World war II book that I've been working on for a long time now. And I realized I haven't yet chosen a poem from the war book to read here today. I think she would have been--I think she's political, intensely political. And I think in other times and in other circumstances, the kind of astonishing action she took in doing that writing would have found expression perhaps in other ways, as well as they were possible. And then what we always want to remember is the joy and the play of writing her poems. So this is one of the poems from the war book. It's called "He Comes For the Jewish Family, 1942":
When the German came, they knew he would take them.
They knew his body hated them,
they could feel it in their bodies when he looked at them,
a kind of wax spread over their skin.
They didn't hate anything like that,
not even the pig, who was merely unclean,
so they knew he was capable of anything.
They had heard about trucks, they could smell his passion
to put them in trucks, he would do it to the children
as avidly as to them. He came and they
looked at their daughter standing with her music
in her hand, the page covered with dots and
lines like some dark language, and they knew
he would take her, their bodies even knew about the camps,
they could smell his gold hair smoking,
they knew it was the end. What they did not know was the
way he would pick her cello up
by the scroll neck and take its dark
lovely body shape and break it
against the fireplace. The brickwork crushed the
amber satiny wood, they stood and
stared at him in terror.
