SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 99
SINE QUA NON
RUTH Traubner KESSLER
Possessions
upon an invitation to contribute an essay to an anthology on grandmothers
This is the age of severance,
although in the sepia photograph
the impossible chorus resurrecting a nightmare
singing out of your life,
singing of all things passing,
is inaudible.
Here you look serenely ahead
as if the future were no more than the idealized landscape
painted on the studio screen behind you,
some imaginary land
where War never happens,
where parents don't get severed from their children,
where the word Grandma rolls sweet as a bonbon on a child's tongue.
The photographer had sat you on a white lacquered bench,
dressed in decorum, that
bubble whose evanescence neither you, nor anyone else
could begin to imagine.
Although perhaps your buttoned-up high-collared dress already knew it,
and your elegant clutch, and your white lace handkerchief
may already have guessed at
their imminent dispossession.
Months later, on a fugitive night train, during the
interminable Siberian crossing, with the leather slashed
and the contents filched by two other refugees whom
you offered your only suitcase as a seat,
decorum became once again
your chief possession.
Now, in this sepia photograph,
you are someone I recognize as my own because of those
dreamy eyes you passed on to your daughter, my mother.
But for years you were transferred from place
to place like a lost, unclaimed piece of luggage.
And for years you were hardly talked about
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