To the Young Protestants holding Portraits of Martin Luther on
the steps of the Catholic Cemetery in Bielsko on All Souls Day
When Luther couldn’t convert his Jewish neighbors, he wrote:
Set fire to their synagogues and schools in honor of our Lord
and of Christendom, that God might see we are Christians.
Between us iron grates and the cries of blackbirds on graves.
Wind circles the firs. A child bounces a red ball.
You stand smiling after five hundred years. You ask for nothing
more than a coin from history, the blessing of pigeons nibbling
crumbs at your feet, but it was never this simple. How young
I was when my parents converted from Catholicism, entered
the plain nave of a Protestant chapel and its Bach cantatas.
Condemned by priests, shunned by our Irish relatives,
we became devout Presbyterians. My Polish grandfather,
a religious and political rebel, wouldn’t let a priest in his house.
In Sunday school, I was taught about the Reformation’s doctrines,
martyrs, exiles. What can a child understand of cruelty
and dogma? I missed my cousins in their First Communion
finery, their frosted cakes. In Europe, in Ireland, death came
for centuries with the swing of a censer, a bare cross replacing
the crucifix, families divided with the slice of a cake knife.
We stand in this land where the people of the book visit us
in the fall wind—Jews and Christians, who’ve strayed,
says the Quran, from God’s true faith. Enough, the blackbirds cry.
by Tersa Cader
from Plume Magazine