Sam Cohen’s Grave At St.Laurent-Sur-Mer, Normandy
Barbara F. Lefcowitz

I run my fingers around the six rims of Samuel Cohen’s white marble Star of
David, want to balance small stones on its angles―an ancient Jewish custom to let the dead know we have visited―but cannot find eve one between the soft blades of green peau de soie lawn.

Do the uniform rows of white crosses protect you, Sam? Or do they mock
your distinctive shape for disrupting  their perfect lines, though all of you struggled from the sea together into the marshes between the huge rocks and Nazi bunkers, lives abruptly ended to annihilate the madness of the time.

With better luck, now you’d be an old man, whose family is bored with your
war stories, or you’d be dead from natural causes, buried beneath a headstone
in Brooklyn or Queens.

(But the sea view here is magnifique, the flowers vivid reds and yellows, the
breezes lightly scented with jasmine.)

Barbara F. Lefcowitz has published nine poetry collections. Her most recent, The Blue Train to America, appeared in 2007. She has won writing fellowships and prizes from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others. Her fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in over five hundred journals. An ex-pat New Yorker, she now lives in Bethesda, Maryland. Recently she has begun to write one-act plays.  She is also a visual artist.

Back