*This is a piece of an ongoing series of poetry by Cecilia Ruvinsky*
His name is Robert Bowers,
Saxon and red-white-and-blue,
while mine is Michaela Ruvinsky,
beautifully harsh
and beautifully Sephardic.
He was born into blue eyes
and ancestral roots
that were never poisoned
by hydrogen cyanide
or swastikas on fire,
while my grandpa,
a man who died alone in Tallahassee,
refused to tell my father
what it was like
to encounter a goy
and whisper anxious prayers in his mind
that if said out loud
would surely guarantee
the loss of his life
and the loss of his gold fillings.
He called Jews the enemies of white people,
and he said that we slaughter his kind.
He snarled that we are the children of Satan,
and he smoked cigarettes
outside his apartment complex,
branding us filthy and evil,
while I remember the Holocaust Museum in Israel,
the way the children in the pictures
stared back at me with generations of sorrow,
and how I couldn’t even cry for them
and their unmarked pinstriped graves
because crying would make the hatred real,
and if the hatred is real,
then I would have to live in a world
full of people hidden in corners
who want to slaughter me and my people,
the way Robert Bowers thinks we want to slaughter his.
He read and reposted anti-Semitic manifestos,
he called us slurs with a tongue dipped in privilege,
and he wrote that we are an infestation in the world,
while I read Night, Schindler’s List, and The Book Thief,
while I wrote my bat mitzvah speech
and perfected my Hebrew characters,
and now I read the news articles that call him a suspect,
and I can only think that that is too delicate a word,
too undetermined,
because in my mind
he is not a suspect –
he is the coal black snowstorm
that rips through the pages of those books
and makes my community
falter in their ancient, land-of milk-and-honey beliefs.
He held a gun in a synagogue in Pittsburgh,
and his finger pulled the trigger that murdered
eleven of my people, injured six others,
and instilled a fear that tastes
like a secret our grandparents had to keep,
while I prepared the seder plate during Pesach
and dipped my finger in wine ten times
for each of the plagues,
while I bowed my head over the Shabbat candle
and recited the blessing with my sister
that felt like magic dancing in my throat,
and then held my fingernails to the flame
and prayed to my God for my sister to be healed.
He held that gun and he murdered eleven,
and with the loss of their lives,
those lives that were never meant to be cut so short
by a coal black snow storm
who perverted himself into a hideous, white supremacist god,
he killed something in the rest of us,
broke us into pieces of matzo and innocence,
and while he awaits his fate,
perhaps a lifetime in prison,
perhaps death row so he can know
what it is to have someone own your death like a prize,
I write this in public and try not to cry,
because how do I explain
to the people around me
that I’m afraid I’ll never finally get to stop being afraid.