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.
Welcome to Poetry Moment. I’m Marjorie Maddox.
In 1980, the US Congress established Days of Remembrance, a week-long commemoration of the Holocaust, observed this year from April 13 to April 20. To honor the victims, Congress also created the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Today’s poet, Henry Israeli, is “[t]he child of a Holocaust survivor and an immigrant to the United States” (The Poetry Foundation). In his poem “The Kingdom Inside Me,” Israeli examines how historical trauma is passed down from generation to generation.
Henry Israeli is the author of four poetry collections, most recently "Our Age of Anxiety" (White Pine Poetry Prize: 2019), and "god’s breath hovering across the waters" (Four Way Books: 2016). His poetry has appeared in numerous journals including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Plume, and The Harvard Review, as well as several anthologies, including "The Best American Poetry." Henry Israeli is also the founder and editor of Saturnalia Books, a Philadelphia based poetry press. He teaches at Drexel University.
Many of us have seen Matryoshka, or Russian nesting dolls, each one smaller than the next until we reach the last, tiny doll, the figure solid with nothing left to open. Likewise, inside each of us are the lives of those who’ve gone before us. In his poem “The Kingdom Inside Me,” Henry Israeli explains, “locked in the smallest nesting doll / of my DNA” are generations of trauma: “genocide, starvation, the terror of pogroms.” Israeli’s haunting poem testifies to the fear and horror passed down in his family from one member to another.
Here’s “The Kingdom Inside Me” by Henry Israeli
The Kingdom Inside Me
The punishing memories that precede
my coming into being, memories trapped
in seeds and those seeds trapped in seeds
and so on down the throat of generations—
genocide, starvation, the terror of pogroms—
locked in the smallest nesting doll
of my DNA, like the one I lost when
I untwisted the pregnant wooden women
and believed the world could be balanced
in a child’s hands, a child looking up
at his mother standing in the kitchen
stirring a pot of soup, humming
an old song she remembers singing
when she crouched under a table
between her parents’ legs, oblivious
to the soldiers climbing the stairs.
That was “The Kingdom Inside Me” by Henry Israeli. Thanks for listening.
Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox, Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can view more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
