Selected Pieces - Fiction
It’s So Quiet Here
by Hannah Rubin, New Hampshire
It’s so quiet here
our voices disperse like
ashes on the breeze
buttercups and clover flowers
dot the drainage ditches
ducks preen themselves
on the concrete border of the sewage pool
here, on this flat expanse of land
checkered with brick and wooden blocks,
there are two types of foliage:
leaves, and
bits of twisted wire
It’s so quiet here
no one cries out from the shells and ruins
no shots echo from the watchtowers
no more stolen suitcases, shoes, and prayer shawls.
here, no trains click and clack past the junctions
with cattle cars full of stifled cargo
soon to be sorted into two groups and
selected.
It’s so quiet here
from the Atlantic to the Baltic
to the southern shores of the Mediterranean.
where are their families, their homes, their villages?
where are their smiles, their songs, their prayers?
here, eighty years later,
I mourn their imagined descendants:
all the beautiful people
the Shoah stole from me