Juliek's Violin
Even here?
In this snowbound barrack?
Suddenly, the illicit sounds
of Beethoven’s concerto
erupt from Juliek’s smuggled violin,
suffusing this doomsday shed
teeming with the trampled
and the barely alive,
realm of frostbite and squalor,
clawing panic and suffocation—
Insane, God of Abraham,
insanely beautiful:
a boy insisting
winter cannot reign forever,
a boy conveying his brief,
bounded life
with a psalmist’s or a cantor’s
arrow-sure ecstasy—
One prison-striped friend
endures to record
the spellbinding strings,
the woebegone—
and the other,
the impossible Polish fiddler,
is motionless by morning,
his renegade instrument
mangled
under the haggard weight
of winter-killed, unraveling men.
Music at the brink of the grave,
eloquent in the pitch dark,
tell-true, indelible,
as never before,
as never after—
Abundance,
emending beauty,
linger in the listening,
truth-carrying soul of Elie,
soul become slalom swift,
camp shrewd, uncrushable;
abundance, be here, always here,
in this not-yet-shattered violin.
Copyright Credit: Cyrus Cassells, "Juliek’s Violin" from The Crossed-Out Swastika. Copyright © 2012 by Cyrus Cassells. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Source: The Crossed-Out Swastika (Copper Canyon Press, 2012)