The Gift

by Cynthia Bernard (Half Moon Bay, CA)

Aunty Anne always wore 
lovely dresses with long sleeves,
even on that sunny day in August
when I sat next to her
at the picnic table,
soft yellow silk slid up her arm,
and I glimpsed the numbers.

What’s that, Aunty Ann?

Oh, just something for grown-ups,
Shayne meydele, she said,
gentle fingers kissing my cheeks.
Go and play.

And so she blessed me
with a few more years 
of childhood

Until that day in fourth grade,
somewhere on the cusp between 
only myself and the larger world,
when I learned about
the six million
and began my search for understanding—
which, of course, 
I have never found.

Cynthia Bernard is an Ashkenazi Jewish woman in her early seventies who is finding her voice as a poet after many years of silence. A long-time classroom teacher and a spiritual mentor, she lives and writes on a hill overlooking the ocean, about 25 miles south of San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Multiplicity Magazine, Heimat Review, The Beatnik Cowboy, The Journal of Radical Wonder, The Bluebird Word, Passager, Persimmon Tree, Verse-Virtual, and elsewhere.

Note:  This poem was first published on December 11, 2023 in Ritualwell and is reprinted here with permission of the author.