Download Numbers Requiem for a stringed instrument

Numbers
Requiem for a
stringed instrument
Tall with red hair,
a furnace blast above the rest,
he shuffles through the line,
books on Madison
tucked beneath his arm.
Thoughts of other lines
file through his mind.
A lost library card
this time.
Questions, forms, exceptions,
a frowning attendant
calls up his identity on a screen.
Numbers flash
like the prick of the needle
that once left numbers on his wrist.
TERESE KARM FI
Half-size Suzuki ~
Gleaming bow and rosin
Harbinger of my daughter's dreams
Hearing you, my mind wanders to Cousin Edith who bought
you as a present
And to her own childhood violin, shattered in Hungary,:
A drop of blood imprinted on every rim.
True, your strings and fingerboard were not at Nyiregyhaza'
And, like me, can know little of the world Edith sawThe Tisza, the Carpathian mountains or the German camps~
Still it is hard to allay my anxiety.
Singing along with my 'own daughter,
Helping her master the whole tradition,
Schubert-Handel-Brahms,
I hear
Edith's violin lies shattered in Hungary
A drop of blood imprinted on every rim.
Edith's violin lies shattered in Hungary
A drop of blood imprinted on every rim.
Edith's violin lies shattered in Hungary
A drop of blood imprinted on every rim.
I cannot reconcile history with so much music.
HINDY LAUER SCHACHTER
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