jose kozer

Daniel Dragomirescu of Contemporary Literary Horizon sent me this poem:

JOSE KOZER

(CUBA - UNITED STATES)

MY FATHER, WHO IS STILL ALIVE

  

My father, who is still alive,

I don’t see him, and I know he has shrunk,

he has a family of brothers burned to ashes

            in Poland,

he never saw them, he learned of the death of

           his mother by telegram,

he didn’t inherit even a single button from his father,

what do I know if he inherited his character.

My father, who was a tailor and a Communist,

my father who didn’t speak and sat on the

            terrace,

to not believe in God,

to not want anything more to do with men,

sullenly withdrawing into himself against Hitler, against Stalin,

my father who once a year would raise a glass

              of whisky,

my father sitting in a neighbour’s apple

              tree eating its

              fruit

the day the Reds entered his village

and made my grandfather dance like a

           bear on the Sabbath,

and made him light a cigarette and smoke it

          on a Sabbath,

and my father left the village for ever,

went away for ever muttering his anger against

         the October revolution,

for ever hammering home that Trotsky was a

         dreamer and Beria a criminal,

abominating books he sat down on the

            terrace a tiny speck of a man,

and told me that the dreams of men are

           nothing more than a

           false literature,

that the history books lie because paper

         can take anything.

My father who was a tailor and a Communist.

*When I followed the Jose Kozer link above, I noticed that he is the age my father would be (b. 1940), and both had immigrant parents from Czechoslovakia.