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      May 24, 2024ShovelsAmit Majmudar

      In a Polish forest as a boy
      In a Cleveland driveway as an old man
      He shoveled, he shoveled
      The secret was to spin and fall
      A heartbeat in advance of the gunshots
      Over the hole in history
      He shoveled, he shoveled
      A heartbeat in advance of the aspirin
      In a Cleveland snowdrift as an old man
      In a Polish winter on another continent
      He shoveled, he shoveled
      In Bialowieza, Europe’s last old-growth forest
      Trees like people hunted to extinction
      Children like winged seeds sailing to a far soil
      He shoveled, he shoveled
      A little divot in a big continent
      And shook out seeds from a paper packet
      Better than clawing his way down
      As he clawed his way up
      Through a Polish mass grave as a boy
      In Bialowieza, where the last oaks crowded into a ghetto
      His pale forearm sprouting in the moonlight
      Dirt and blood lining his fingernails
      Lying on his back in the mound
      He shoveled, he shoveled
      Screaming soundlessly into the soundless flurries
      In a Cleveland driveway as an old man
      In a Polish forest as a boy

      from #83 – Collaboration

      Amit Majmudar

      “I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland filled with Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their descendants. I was always fascinated by the histories that lived in the accents and eyes of my friends’ grandparents. This poem was prompted by my memory of a classmate’s grandfather who survived the Holocaust by hiding in Europe’s last old-growth forest and died in an Ohio winter many decades later, while shoveling snow. The image of the shovel connected, for me, Josh’s grandfather’s past and his end, for he had been forced, when a child, to help dig a mass grave.”

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