A Family History

I am tall like my great-great grandfather,

Stradon, the curve of whose back shielded

a Jewish boy from Nazi gunfire. The two

bodies were discarded in a mass grave,

but the boy feigned death till night

and slipped away.

My eyes are from my great-grandfather, who,

in a German labor camp, longed to go to church on Sunday.

He asked to make up his labor with a double-shift another day,

earning a bullet to the head for his request.

He kneeled before the village, and he prayed

“Our Father who art in heaven”

but never made it to “amen.”

My grandfather and I share a Slavic paleness,

his made paler from a life in and out of custody

for leading underground church meetings,

from hiding Bibles in grain buckets, monthly fines, and hunger pains.

Or from seeing the bag my grandmother stocked with warm socks

and winter boots every morning by the door, left there

to take with him in case he was seized

by night for Siberian prison. Like him,

I can never get warm – his bones carried

a permanent chill since the night he was transported

in an open car in just a shirt in Ukrainian winter.

But he was free that morning when he led

Communion in a hidden church and sipped the wine

that was poisoned by the KGB and died.

My father smiled when he stood

before his classroom with his siblings,

suffering slurs from teachers as dissenters.

My uncle was denied use of the restroom for eight hours

until he peed and was thrown into a blizzard,

forced to walk two kilometers home

and then he contracted scarlet fever.

My brain comes from my father,

a straight-A student red-listed from universities,

denied the chance to become an artist because he

refused to renounce his belief in God.

My hands are like his, too, long and thick,

though his fingernail is blackened

by a misfired hammer to make ends meet

with no salary while serving in

full-time pastorship.

I feel too much at the sight of red,

the blood of Communism.

And if I ever had any doubts about the reality of God

they are dispelled by the Light from his face

as he comes back from Communion,

carrying in the bells of his voice

all the breath of our ancestors’ bodies.

They haunt the cloisters of our bones

and mark me like an anointing.