V E R S E and I M A G E

They are quiet in their photographs,

my mother’s dead.

They speak to me, entreat me to explain.

A magnifying glass held to their fading faces

proves scant help.

To listen, I must listen to myself,

to memory.

from Unblessed, Unsung, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro PA; © 2025

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To speak with the dead, one must listen to oneself.

Before my mother died we talked about dying. Her dying. When I helped her fill out the living will forms. Before the first visit from the palliative care nurse. As her health took yet another sudden stepwise decline. I asked her, not at all for the first time, “Do you want to go to the doctor? To the hospital?” “No. No.” And then we didn’t talk about it any more.

Instead we talked with the dead. Some people approaching the end of their life close themselves off. They draw the veil about their diminishment and turn inward. My mother, though, turned outward, like a great flower that slowly pivots throughout the day to face the sun. Like one of those giant radio telescopes that can hear the earliest whispers of creation, she became a passive receptor who welcomed anything anyone desired to bring her. I brought her the dead.

Photographs of the dead. Some were in antique frames, some dropping from ancient scrapbooks, most of them loose in envelopes or the bottom of cartons. She and I collected them all into a grand new album and along the way we told each other stories. “Isn’t that Lucy and Ted just married? Linda and I met them at Nana’s reunion 50 years ago. And there’s you with Lucy, both teenagers. Now here’s Carlyle in the little car Grandpop built for him. I guess it was already obvious he’d be crazy for cars the rest of his life.”

Some stories she told me; some I imagined while she fingered the photos and nodded in silence. At the moment of shutterclick, each photo was created within its world of vast significance. Those worlds dissipate, decrescendo in brilliance like photons that have traveled light-years to reach our eyes, red-shifted with distance in an expanding universe. But during those moments together my mother could enter their world and hear them, the dead, their voices.

Next month it will have been a year since my mother exhaled her last breath. Her living essence has joined the whispers of the cosmos. Her essence still lives in me and all who knew her and who have not yet joined the dead. Yesterday I found a photo Grandpop took of Mom at age 10 surrounded by her wonderful collection of dolls. There it is, that hint of a smile on her lips, in her eyes, the joyful teasing hint I have seen in person a million times. But looking at that photo is not when I miss her most. The pang of absence strikes me most sharply when a random question pops into my head: “Did you have boy friends before Dad? What was it like to be living 500 miles from Nana and Grandpop when I was born? Who is that standing behind you in this photo?”

Some of the questions I may once have asked but don’t recall her answers. Most are questions it never occurred to me to ask while we were together on the earth. Now when I pull that grand album off the shelf, her picture will also be among those gone mute. But not completely so. Memory tangles and untangles itself to create new stories. I will listen to my heart. I am now the one who must speak with the dead.

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Elizabeth is home with the baby; Ben sits beside his sons

on the hard bench. All three wear yarmulkes, Ben is draped

in his tallis – Reuben and Joseph are too young. The black

straps of tefillin tightly encircle his left hand and arm;

the boxes press into his forehead and bicep.

The drone of men praying, the vibrato of the old rebbe raised

above their voices, the distant murmur and rustle of women

and girls in the balcony above, and Ben’s own chanted Hebrew,

eyes closed, davening deeply – all are as necessary and familiar

as his heart’s beats and his quiet breaths.

His boys can barely wait for the blowing of the shofar,

the twisted, ridged ram’s horn the see near the ark.

Ben hears Joe whisper to Rube, “When?” and Rube’s loud

“Shush!” Ben is clean-shaven, unlike the older men. He goes

daily to Boris Adelman, the barber on 21st Street, who keeps

a chin mug painted with his name, Benjamin Nax, on a shelf.

His disc of soap, his ivory brush. Boris strops the razor on a

lng leather strap It’s sinful to let his mind wander like this

on a Day of Awe. He gives thanks for his children: Rube,

a little man; Joseph, their angel. now Elsie.

He was once a boy sitting with is father and grandfathers

in shul. His chest hollows around their absence. They could easily

be dead, and his uncles and mother, lined up to be shot on the

edge of a ditch. No wisdom from grandfathers for his boys.

The cantor raised the shofar to his lips and fills his lungs.

Joe has fallen asleep leaning against him, and starts awake at the

first blast. Intervals of blast and chant: Tekia! Sevarim! T’ruah!

Renew our days! Mercy is aroused! Judgement is removed!

Reverberating in the small chilly building, this uncanny sound

of the desert, the First Temple, the shtetl, and the ninety-nine

synagogues of Minsk.

Ben takes his boys’ hands, and the three are surrounded

on the sidewalk by greetings: L’shonah tovah! Gut yontif!

A gut gebentsht yor! It isn’t his name, Benjamin Nax.

It was changed at Ellis Island, from Binyomin Nakhimovsky.

What is there to believe, in America?

from Unblessed, Unsung, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro PA; © 2025

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Her story begins in cruelty concealed and unspoken. It wends its way through hardship and regret, between guilt and resentment. It ends as it started, in death. But that is not all. That is only one harsh thread of the story. The story feeds itself with family love and devotion. It clings to hope in darkness. The story opens its pages because of the expansive heart of the one who desires to be its guardian, its intrepid explorer, its teller. Thus the journey of Unblessed, Unsung by Joan Barasovska.

There is a bit of mountain trail that winds across a mile or two of bald slopes at Bluff Ridge along the Blue Ridge Parkway. If the summer grass has grown waist high and the cows have not been pastured there this season, the trail is obscured, untraceable except for this: in the 1930’s, the Civilian Conservation Corps placed concrete markers, posts two feet tall, to guide the hiker along the path. Joan has found her own waypoints to reveal her own path into her past: a few fading sepia photographs; recollections written down by cousins; conversations with a last survivor. To these she has applied the poet’s toolkit, observation and imagination, to render this book and bring it to life.

Some of the questions Joan must ask about her grandparents have discernable answers. Where did they grow up? What year did they arrive in America? But many answers are as intangible as smoke from an extinguished candle and as difficult to clasp. Joan uses what clues she can amass – a facial expression in an old photo; a fragment of tale from a distant cousin – to build an enlarging picture. If we don’t always know exactly how this man and that woman felt, at least we know that they did feel and we can hope to project their circumstances into our own dilemmas and responses. Considering another person’s memories is a fruitful impetus to reliving our own memories. At the beginning of Unblessed, Unsung Joan quotes Zora Neale Hurston: There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you. Here is a story borne and bared. May these poems now weave and tangle more stories, a never-completed tapestry.

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Joan Barasovska lives in Orange County, North Carolina, USA, and has authored three previous poetry collections. Unblessed, Unsung is available from MAIN STREET RAG.

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If I told you I hear their voices

in the apartment on Christian Street,

would you visit there with me?

At the table where they take their meals,

or by the stove, where Elizabeth stands,

adding potatoes to stretch a soup?

Between husband and wife,

what heat, what chill, what

balance of force and yield?

The rooms are scrubbed raw-clean,

it’s crowded, voices are raised,

the three children witness everything.

It’s a time before parents learned

to safeguard childhood. If I told you I hear

cruelty, in word if not in deed, trust me.

from Unblessed, Unsung, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro PA; © 2025

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