…..
The Salt Pond in Autumn
……….for Mira
….
The season’s last butterflies
in near-death delirium
dance like schoolgirls
dotting the shoreline,
dropping radiance
from silky pinafores,
G-d is granting
the death of pine forests.
……
Why do you frown
my dearest pilgrim?
Waves of the Danube,
the waltz of immigrants
briny Slavic lyrics
Jewish notes played too fast,
American imperatives
to obliterate the past.
…..
We’ve forgotten it all,
we couldn’t forget,
howling like a whale
beached at Nantucket.
We pressed the lemon of memories
squeezed it inside out;
the highball of reveries,
the lowball of time.
….
This poem is from the book Kinship by Maxim D. Shrayer (Finishing Line Press) and is available at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/kinship-by-maxim-d-shrayer/ , amazon, and everywhere books are sold.
Kinship, the new collection of poetry by the bilingual author, Boston College professor Maxim D. Shrayer, weaves together some of the principal themes in modern Jewish history: ancestry in Eastern Europe, the Shoah, antisemitism, exile, displacement and immigration, Zionism and Israel. Shrayer’s richly orchestrated and formally elegant verse captures with poignancy and passion what it feels like to be a Jewish poet with Soviet roots, living in America during Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine. Kinship is, ultimately, a pained and inspiring meditation on writing between languages and cultures.
Maxim D. Shrayer, bilingual author, scholar, and translator, was born in Moscow in 1967 to a Jewish-Russian family and immigrated to the United States in 1987. A professor at Boston College, Shrayer has authored and edited more than twenty-five books. His recent poetry collections include the Russian-language Stikhi iz aipada (Poems from the iPad, Tel Aviv, 2022) and the English-language Of Politics and Pandemics (Boston, 2020). Among Shrayer’s other books are the literary memoirs Waiting for America, Leaving Russia, and Immigrant Baggage. He is the recipient of a 2007 National Jewish Book Award and a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Dr. Karen E. Lasser, their daughters, Mira Isabella and Tatiana Rebecca, and their silver Jewdle, Stella.
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