For an Old Jew

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A man grey as dead bark
praises the sunrise by pointing
at it, his finger horned and bent.
High reverence in his gesture
suggests calamities yet to come
and a death postponed a half-century.

Mornings on the outskirts of Berlin
the days sidled over the edge of the world
nonchalant unto careless. He remembers
his fear that God did not give shit
enough to hurry, then fear of retribution
for his blasphemous thoughts.

The soldiers came in the dark
to carry away all he loved. The door
kicked in like a mouth. The apartment
ransacked. The sound of his father's head
on each wooden step as the soldiers descended.

He points to the sun
as if they have an inside joke
about guilt, the kind a man breathes
when he wakes early, when he
can't sleep and so rises to wait
for the light to finally show up, still tardy
just like in Berlin when he was a boy.