a striped cap behind museum plastic,
names pressed into stone
by hands now bone.
we walk through ruins of silence
where memory is curated,
ghosts patient.
In the museum we said
never again
as if it was a promise,
a shield of syllables,
we could wrap around our children here
before they were pulled from their beds.
We cry at the absence
as if it belongs only to the past.
but here
the past is the present walking
in dusty Shoresh sandals beside us,
passing out tehilim
at the site where music was swallowed by gunfire.
The Nova field is still breathing.
The kibbutzim are still cooking
lunch in the communal kitchen,
hands folding laundry,
in a home
that was not so long ago
filled with shadows of rifles and smoke.
Stickers of young soldiers in uniform
cling to bus stops, falafel stands,
a thousand eyes meeting ours.
They’ll fade,
sun-bleached like the black and white portraits
in a Yad Vashem exhibit,
the glue curling and wrinkling in the sun.
Future teenagers will photograph them
on school trips
like we once did,
standing on rusted tracks in Poland.
We are yizkor
before we are liturgy.
We are in the rawness that is slowly becoming prayer.
On a hill in the Galil,
a saba plants a fig tree in a garden
that his grandson will never get to see,
for our grief is not the end of our story.
In Tel Aviv
a child tapes a rainbow drawing to her window,
a divine promise
that even after the flood,
we begin again.
We are the hands that remember how to build,
the voices around a Shabbat table
telling tales not yet written in books,
the child learning songs her grandmother once had to whisper,
the old man who still stands in silence when the siren sounds.
This is how memory becomes a seed–
not buried,
but planted.
Watered by names we speak aloud.
By the quiet rituals that outlive the roar of missiles.
By the stubborn bloom
of a people who stay.
Not untouched, but woven tight
with a thread that refuses to break-
spun by those who came before us,
held in the hands of the living.
Still here.
Still here.
