I know I'm pushing Plante's patience but here's poem #3

My mothers mother
Uses tea bags three times
Dipping
Einz, zwei, drei,
And then drying them
On polish crockery
To be used
Again
And again
When she gives me the cup
Brewed with burned tea leaves
And softened with old milk
Her hands shake.
She is not the kind of woman
Who normally has quaking hands.
“why do you want to hear these things?”
“Ich bin neugarig.”
My mothers mothers blood
Is stained with forced tattoo
Whose poisoned ink still runs through my veins
Her hands still scared
Where they gripped barbed wire
When I open my mouth
To speak the old language.
Her eyes water
“that language betrayed us.
I am American now. You are American.”
She pauses.
“Besides, you said that wrong.”

My fathers father
Sat me on his knee
Taught me to count
Eins, zwei, drei,
Taught me my letters
Ah, bee, Sey,
Taught me the language of my name

My fathers father
Is missing the pointer finger
On his right hand
When I was young he told me
That it was bitten off by a lion
In Egypt.
When I grew old enough
To learn the words
World
War
Two
I asked him if he was with rommel
In the desert

My fathers father wont tell me where he was
What he was
Who he was
But I know he was army at least.
So I know he probably was
That hated hated word.

Did my fathers father
Stare at my mothers mother
Through a chain link fence
In the old country
Hating her
Loathing him
Across a void so vast
No one thought it would ever be spanned.
Not knowing that 40 years later
Their blood would mix
Their languages would join
And connect
And bind
And form something
Strange
American
Me.
I speak with the tongue that tried to kill my grandmother
I pray with the religion he thought was taking over the world
Their battles are clawing apart my blood
Until I am not be anything anymore
Not Jew
Not German
They tried to erase the past by becoming America
And yet I am everything
All of it
Too.