A dear friend shared this poem in a conversation about my last Tumblr post linking to the talk on Vulnerability. This poem is a gem, and I wanted to share it here on the off-chance that some of you have never read it:
In 1945, when the keepers cried kaput
Josef Stein, poet, came out of Dachau
Like half a resurrection, his other half
eighty pounds still in their invisible grave.
Slowly then the mouth opened at first
a broth, and then a medication, and then
a diet, and all in time and the knitting mercies,
the showing bones were buried back in flesh,
and the miracle was finished. Josef Stein
man and poet, rose, walked, and could even
beget, and did, and later died of other causes
only partly traceable to his first death.
He noted - with some surprise at first -
that strangers could not tell he had died once.
He returned to his post in the library, drank his beer,
published three poems in a French magazine,
and was very kind to the son who at last was his.
In the spent of one night he wrote three propositions:
That Hell is the denial of the ordinary. That nothing lasts.
That clean white paper waiting under a pen
is the gift beyond history and hurt and heaven.
