Michele Root-Bernstein
A Sapling Tree Bends Down to Weep
War demands poetry, like a wound demands bandaging. My father was not a poet, except that he was once a soldier. At the age of twenty-one, in the wake of the Normandy invasion of 1944, he and thousands of other young men slogged their way through the fields of France, fouling “hands and knees/With a crap-shooting Death…” That’s how he saw it. He had little faith that words conveyed the enormity of “Young men, dead-lain upon the ground” in a forest grove. “Words do not bleed,” he wrote, “words do not belly like.” But in the face of that “butchery which has no translation,” words were all he had of dignity.
dappled light
holes held together
with spider silk
About the Author
Michele Root-Bernstein devotes herself to haiku, haibun, and haiga. The former book review editor of Modern Haiku, she currently facilitates the Michigan-based Evergreen Haiku Study Group. Her e-chapbook Wind Rose (Snapshot Press) received a Haiku Society of America Merit Book Award honorable mention in 2020. She won the 2022 Snapshot Press Book Awards for her full-length collection Plainsong.