BEDOUIN-KIN
 

1.

There was (or is?) a colonel on my father's side
he once showed me a photo of
in the New York Times, must have been

late 1940's. Picture with me if you will 
a Bedouin-kin, baked stoic
look in a lean face, earnest gaze,

much like a younger version of my father
with the added dash of a military-bar mustache
above the tailored uniform of the Iraqi elite corps -

uncle? cousin? nephew? - who
knew? In the time it takes to 
glance and register a node 

of hardly any interest to a boy,
I noted the family face, like an echo
visible down the ages, and looked away, 

taking in as little as I could then. 

2.
                                 It comes
as no surprise: the older you get
the further back it takes 

to reach some bare,
buried note
no matter how random or remote

a recognition or fleeting
trace.  Except for an obscure
oddball uncle or two, we hardly knew

his side...He didn't offer,
we didn't pursue - not unusual
for a boy whose total consuming mental effort

was: not to be there. Families are to flee from...

3.

In the cyanide light of recent events, 
I wonder what became of him: did the high command 
know he was a Jew?

Might he have survived the cabals, purges, coups 
that periodically irrigate
those blood-thirsty Biblical sands?

If he converted to other
than the double masquerade of the Marranos,
did he pass, or what loopholes slip through? 

All that is moot.
As with the rest of his clan, I never asked 
or gave him a thought.

In the annulling anonymity of time that makes us
all the same age at once, little more than
a pang says he has most likely been erased

from human eyes. When mine last saw his, 
he could have been anyone - anonymous 
as an atom -, as my father is and I will be,

so that if only for the moment it takes
to tell of hardly 
any difference between a possible life, partly

mine, and certain extinction, which is everyone's, 
let this memory pass as virtual 
elegy and its fleeting 

(as his life most likely has 
long since been) 
take place in the real.