The Cross
Sitting on my roof deck
Indian summer sunshine
drawing an ancient symbol
on a sheet of paper...

By first eye sight
the symbol seemed to be
a solid cross
but looking deeper

the cross disappeared
and I saw four petals...
the more I tried to see the cross
the more I saw the flower:

Ancient living power
Adinkra Symbol from Africa,
Musuyidee (mo-soo-yee-day):
uprightness and spiritual balance,
sanctity, strength, fortune and luck...

Drawing the symbol
nine times in a row
suddenly it came to me,
I had a flashback:

Seeing myself in Germany
in nineteenseventy,
wearing the cross
round my neck...

people stared at me,
cursed me out
old men started to scream and to shout,
white foam round their mouth...

Why all this excitement?
Cuz everyone could see
a girl with fair, waist long hair
bejewelled with the iron cross of honor\

given by criminals to men they called
"German soldiers", who were trying to survive;
trying to save their skin and their companions lives
in a slaughterhouse called world war II...

My necklace was silently and in peace
my performing art, my way of provocation
for left over Nazis
in the western part of the German nation

Cuz many of them did survive;
again in positions, again on top!
in universities, governments,
all over the place, my friends!

They’ve never been in the killing fields
like my father who by the way never believed
in their paroles;
he was ordered to Stalingrad by feet
where he was shot seven times

As a child I counted the holes;
his heart saved by a holy books cover,
the leather thick enough
for the bullet to stop

My father gave me his iron cross willingly,
warning me - he knew what I would do:
I hung it for a while from my neck,
Me. From my mother's side a Jew

© Sena, Brooklyn NY Sept 10, 2001

I wrote this poem one day before the twin towers crumbled to dust-  I did not yet know why I was feeling so weird, as if life was on hold