Tino Villanueva is a Somerville Bagel Bard and has also been included in The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature edited by Ilan Stevens. This is an excerpt from his poem “At the Holocaust Museum: Washington, D.C.” that appears in the anthology.

AT THE HOLOCAUST MUSEUM

III. The Photographs

To look
into devastated eyes in not enough;  to touch
the photographs is not enough.
Even if their breath could reach me,
I could utter nothing among the ruins
written with light.
But someone such as I, a nobody in all of this,
has come to see (this much the heart allows):
what man has done to man, human acts of the profane,
and the defeated countryside.

Led to camps
by the uniform substance of hate,
one by one they held
still enough to be caught in the strict regulation
of natural or flat light.  I read it in their eyes:
reluctance seeking its own landscape
with so much night to come.  To myself I say:
this face, or that face had a name:
Joseph, Daniel, or Hannah,
but oh, you are a number—
sharp alchemy scored on skin.
I pray your soul remained intact until the end.

(Print after print:  I am carried away by destruction
exhausted into fact, forgetting
the persecuted who escaped;  who from the
edges of the battlefield were saved, here by a
timely neighbor, a benevolent baker;  there by a
factory owner, a farmer, or by decent Catholic nuns
—reflexive act of the unsung.)

Then there was Ejszyszki (A-shish-key), 1941:
a village of 4,000 that could not find the
doors to exodus—slaughtered in two days.
I touch the photographs of how it was
before it ended in a great field of darkness…
and my body shrieks.
Five decades, and in another country,
I am too late in a blazing nightmare
where I reach out,
but cannot save you, cannot save you.
Sarah, Rachel, Benjamin, in this light you have risen,
where the past is construed as present.
For all that is in me:  Let the dead go on living,
let these words become human.

I am your memory now.

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