JUDITH R. ROBINSON

As a Jew born during WW II, Judith R. Robinson feels fortunate that her birth took place in America. How her life might have gone otherwise has been a subject of study and identity for her, leading her to generate in poetry and painting works that interpret a tragic history. Robinson is an editor, teacher, fiction writer, and poet. In addition to her focus on The Holocaust, she has published five poetry collections, one fiction collection, one novel, and has edited or co-edited eleven poetry collections. She is a teacher at Osher at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Grace Cavalieri sees her as a poet who "composes poems like songs with clarity and vision, trimmed with memory," taking you "along the road she’s traveling...as she holds her mirror up to the world.” www.judithrobinson.com

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Jewish Eyes

burst like stars 

stare back into the ghetto night

smoke and flame rage to blot them 

but the iridescent eyes

gaze on the piles of shattered limbs

the thick red grief

and promise to remember

Publication Credit: The Numbers Keep Changing, The Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, April-June, 2019.

I Apologize

to my precious elders;

the valuable ones, 

those thick-fleshed

indestructible Jews

I have known, 

those who 

endured; those who

had the clenched tooth

grit to flee before 

the ovens were lit, 

those --bergs and --steins

and --skis 

those tailors artists bakers 

peddlers scholars music-makers

who did not become the incinerated trash of Europe:

My own people, once stalwart as the stars, 

must now weep as we, their stunning progeny,

disappear like shadows into the cracked cement of sweet America

our brainless heads sucked under the white foam,

merging, whistling, forgetting, drowning, dancing,

no lessons learned, refusing to keep anything.

 

Publication Credits: Voices Israel, Rueben Rose International Poetry Competition Award, 2011

and Orange Fire, Main Street Rag Publishing, 2012

Yad Vashem*

Here bloom green 

carob trees

sweet with spring; 

the righteous few

are not forgotten 

in Our Garden.

Silence pours 

from leaf and vine.

Note the smooth 

Stone shapes

amid the blossoms:

the sculpted mother's

arms around

her baby:

Tenderness,

the first remembrance

of the human artist.

Beyond the blossoms

his last remembrance,

Darkness:

the dying ashes, the

tiny flames that

burn eternal

within the concrete

and basalt.

* Yad Vashem is the name of the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in Jerusalem

Publication Credits: The Blue Heart, Finishing Line Press, 2013 and

House of Israel, Balboa Park, CA, archived in “Fused” exhibition, 2014

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Rage

in remembrance of the Sharpeville Massacre

It disturbs, this slanting light

yellow & rapturous

and once a part of promise.

Mocking now, and strange

these sighing palms

that stirred with expectation.

How like betrayal

the stillness of summer flowers

quiet, beautiful, unfaded.

I was not an alien here.

I was as one with the light

the palms, the lilies.

Why did the earth I loved

not cry out for me

as my life’s blood 

was sought and taken?

Publication Credit: The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Summer, 1991 and Orange Fire, Main Street Rag, 2012

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Buy A Ticket

An old, diminished town.

Broken streets, broken glass.

Walls here are layered 

Many coats of paint, all peeling.

Flakes of rust glom on to any metal. 

The salt does this.

A lone surprise amidst the grit:

A chrome-bright gym open 

Twenty-four-seven for the afflicted 

The jobless-wounded-welfare-ians who 

Nagging at scabs, cannot sleep.

Someone says dance, someone says hope,

Someone says Wal Mart is coming;

Someone says try this, it will take off the edge

No one on the other side knows squat but

Of one truth the pounded-bruised-lacerated 

Are certain---money would make everyone happy.

Copyright © Judith R. Robinson