Marek was an antique child of the modern day—

Zofia, his grandmother,

brought the chill, round pearls

Of her grade-school rosary to her orchid-petal lips,

With her thin, tired hair tickling the floorboards from underneath,

With her willowy arm clutching the slight figure of Tesia—

Next-door’s daughter

With David’s star sewn crudely to her shoulder—

As the two breathed hardly a breath

Hardly dared to scratch a running nose.

And the heartless click of Nazi boots

Sounded overhead like death knells,

But she smiled like the sun always did

From behind his amber throne on the mountains of Zakopane

Because two sacred inches of floorboards—

And the courage only a painter’s daughter could muster—

Had saved Tesia,

And the prayer shawl she bit to keep her breath inside,

From the cruel fascist furnaces burning in Auschwitz,

Dachau, Treblinka.

From under the kitchen table, Zofia had reached out

And pulled a Rabbi’s niece from the calloused lips of Hell.

Her grandson was a painter.

Marek was a quiet man,

Subtle in his art, and decent in his work—

He often resembled, she told him,

Even had the same ears and chin as Piotr,

The boy next door in Warsaw

Who had left the Rabbi’s niece huddled in her room

In hopes of saving his own life, careless to hers,

As the city burned with caustic hatred and heat.

Marek sat in his bedroom, painted the sky,

As the risks, riots, and needy of the twenty-first century

Clawed at his doorpost.

Zofia beckoned to the floorboards, to others, rosary in hand,

But Marek knew none but himself,

And his art, he said.

And his art, Zofia spat

And knew that history’s wake had long faded for him.