I am a museum

for the voided void.

My walls speak words a millennium old.

My home it’s built in homage to you,

the displaced, the disoriented,

Resilient Jew.

 

I don’t claim to be facts.

nor a timeline of terror.

No, I won’t chronicle each. Last. Tremor.

 

Keep going.

Past the hair, the glasses, the letters unread.

Past the accounts of genocide mapped out in your head,

 

to the room at the end that’s made of stone.

Without heat or light,

you’ll feel you’re alone.

But the Holocaust Tower, small it may be,

was never intended to stand empty.

 

Stop there!

Can you hear the wail of a murdered Jew?

Who’s finally come to the surface in you.

You cry for him, and the millions more,

because who are you,

if you’re not crying for

 

the bloodlines of family you never met,

or the Jews in the art you’ll likely forget.

 

In my home… you can cry.

For all those who suffer

at the useless, wasted hands of each other.

 

I don’t mind,

if you leave your grief with me,

once you’ve been and done what you came here to see.

 

All the matters is your empathy.

 

* An ode to the Jewish Museum in Berlin, to my family lost in the Holocaust, and to all humanity that aches by cause of one another.