This is poetry moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
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Welcome to Poetry Moment.
The color yellow typically evokes the positive: daffodils, sunshine, happiness. But not always. In today’s poem, “Yellow,” Lisa Grunberger wonders if her father wore the Jewish star, as well as “what happened to [him] on that boat. . . that rescued him from being murdered by the Nazis.”
Pushcart nominee and Temple University Professor Lisa Grunberger is a poet and memoirist. Her poetry book, For the Future of Girls was nominated for an Eric Hoffer Independent Book Award. She lives in a South Philly row house with her family and is the former Arts and Culture editor of the Philadelphia Jewish Voice.
Author Lisa Grunberger explains, “Yellow” “is a poem of memory, and not-memory, written in the subjunctive tense of not-knowing…. It. . . combines the erotic, budding sexuality of a young girl with the longings of war and loneliness and loss. . . . I'm always thinking and writing about how war shapes domestic life in ways we rarely think about, its reverberations so intimate, like a zipper, a kiss.”
Here’s “Yellow” by Lisa Grunberger
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It is late December and I want
to remember my mother’s recipe
for almond crescents. If I remembered
everything I would know if my father
lived through Kristallnacht, wore
a Jewish star his mother sewed.
I would know the name of the store
where Oma bought the thread––or did
she pull it out from one of Opa’s suits,
a yellow seam from the inner pants thigh?
I would know what my father saw minutes before
he boarded the ship, full of rotten potatoes and onions,
that took him to the illegal shores of Palestine.
The lists, I would not remember:
cat food, toilet paper, double A batteries.
I would not remember when I was nine
at Jones Beach, the day I ran into
ten-foot waves, tossed and turned into stone.
I would not remember floating in the Dead Sea,
holding hands with the stranger boy
from the summer youth bus,
his hand soft and hot and muddy
his lips salty from California.
My fifteen-year-old nails dig into
his sunburned back. He shows me
the scars later by the fig tree, his t-shirt
rolled up to his narrow, freckled shoulders.
Shipped between statue and shadow
my father bites into a rotten onion.
The soot of Berlin’s synagogues clings to his shirt.
He smokes a cigarette with a Polish boy,
flicks the ashes into the Mediterranean,
into which my mother, fifteen runs,
her hair golden curls, the boy behind her
a soldier, always a soldier.
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That was “Yellow” by Lisa Grunberger. Thanks for listening.
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Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
