My Father's Shadow - Poem

Judaism, Spring, 2001 by Marc J. Straus

I am my father's shadow, faint and elliptical on a dusty road. I am the shadow of the grandfather I never knew, except from a photo-gray long coat, thick mustache. I don't speak their languages, their dialects; they crisscrossed so many borders. I don't know any of them: the bent-over tailors, penniless students, bearded merchants, thin-boned housewives, ghostly Jews. They are nothing now but beads of chromosomes, a piece here and there, one with diabetes, another perhaps with coronary artery disease, and another with curiosity as sharp as a tiger's tooth. I am number one-sixty, or there about. My son is as thick as a tree, my daughter lighter than sunshine. They are number one-sixty-one, and unto them I lay down my shadow. It barely shimmers in the autumn breeze.

MARC J. STRAUS has published poetry in The Kenyon Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review,JAMA, and Ploughshares. His collection, One Word, waspublished in 1994. His second collection, Symmetry, was published in February 2000. He has a medical oncology practice in White Plains, New York, and was a Yaddofellow in 1993.