Vox Populi
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Elizabeth Jacobson: There are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral
I walk a long way
sinking in soft sand.
My feet, two creatures
of burden.
Low lying clouds
mirror stormy ocean waves
and wild eddies.
The wrack line
littered with elkhorn
with coral sponges—
each one a finger
from a different hand.
Disappeared
are the reefs
they arose from.
As a child
I combed black rocks of a jetty
prying starfish from pools
sucked salt
off their legs,
curious podia searching
my tongue.
I craved also
the taste of ash
ate cigarette butts
from the beach—
put anything in my mouth
to know it.
.
I was nine
when I first saw the photographs—
bodies overflowing
from wheelbarrows.
Corpses pitched
in heaps like firewood
at the sides of barracks.
Didn't recognize what they were.
Then I noticed the bird,
a raven,
eating
the inside of a human nose.
.
There are as many songs in the world
as branches of coral.
The sponges
the sea pens,
the whips,
have a bloody
earthy smell.
I lay the few I’ve collected
on a wicker table to dry
under the adonidia palms
and squeeze out the remaining brine.
Soon they begin to sigh.
.
These hours
when the sky is white
my heart reels
like a cay in a squall
and I arrive again
at the scowl
of the red brick gate.
There were no clouds
that day, above the camp.
The grassy fields
bright green.
Tall birches
in full leaf.
I walked weightlessly
on the train tracks,
one foot
in front of the other
balancing on rails.
I pulled a rusty hair pin
from the soil
put it in my mouth—
75-year-old tarnish
a perfumed
female essence.
The remaining brick
chimneys crumbling,
splintered garrisons—
burial pits moaned—
here was an endless landscape
of hatred this primeval—
it was as if I saw
each soul
who had arrived and
departed,
shimmering,
impossibly,
in the emerald fields.
And everything
broke open
and sang.
.
There were no clouds
that day
I visited Birkenau,
but the sky,
it was white.
The meadows,
they glistened,
the tall birches,
beckoned.
Before I left
I ate a few blades of grass—
peeled off a strip of bark
pressed two sharp stones
into my well-made shoe.
Elizabeth Jacobson was the fifth Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets 2020 Poets Laureate Fellow. Her most recent book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019), and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book.
Copyright 2021 Elizabeth Jacobson. First published in the Ginko Prize, 2021.
Vox Populi 
You say this difficult thing in a way I can hold it and yet also hear the songs.
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Thank you, Barbara!
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Stunning!
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Thank you, Robert!
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Beautiful. I have yet to write about my visits to the camps in Poland. I can never find words that deep. Thank you.
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