Author: Tovli "Linnie" Simiryan
Location: Charleston, West Virginia

Tovli is an award-winning writer currently living in West Virginia with her husband, Yosif, and mother-in-law, Ester. The family came to America as refugees from the former Soviet Union (Moldova) in 1992. Tovli's writings have appeared in a variety of publications. She has published two books of poetry: The Breaking of the Glass and Fixing the Broken Glass. A collection of short fiction, Ruach of the Elders-Spiritual Teachings of the Silent, will be marketed in 2008.

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Beautiful Days

“The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn’t. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders.”
Yehuda Bauer, 2001

Tell me something cold.
Talk thin,
I haven’t much time.
Wrap words
in steel;
they
are bullets
stored beneath
papa’s bed;
little explosives
turning pages
in our lives.

And who will they murder next?
Between
loneliness
at breakfast time,
colour fading
from our eyes
I realized…
our elders
lack long bursts
of sorrow.

Laughter keeps
them slender, sinewy;
more than just specks
of dust;
their voices
sticking to night air
as though winter never ended.

Whisper something tenuous;
like sun-light disappearing.
We’re about to listen,
slowly at first…

Look, papa, it’s morning;
a bright blue sky;
but what has become of our people?

Note: For our cousins of Darfur—silence should find words—let it be yesterday, at the latest.

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