Dear Students

I want to talk about my story

of walking into your high school my first year of teaching,

gang symbols deeply carved into desks and doors, a Star of David

as shocking as running my fingers along a tattoo of numbers.

I hold the star dangling around my neck as I alphabetize the bookshelf.

I am embarrassed to tell the story

of my people abandoning the neighborhood. In the vacant school library,

I flip through old yearbooks–1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s, Jewish names, white faces.

Change comes; historic boulevard synagogues convert into Black churches.

Stars of David stay, sculpted in stone archways.

Why did they uproot themselves, so fully, so frequently –

the first half of the twentieth century a suitcase

rarely unpacked before lifting boundaries and borders over families.

In the doorway of your West Side home, two holes remain

from the nails of a mezuzah, from which you created myths.

In these wide high school hallways dotted with security,

my ghosts consider their anecdotes of otherness, their cowardness, their flight.

When you give me silence, I feel older than twenty-three.

We listen to the piano down the hall, soothing ebony and ivory jazz,

as students learn to play the school’s maroon and gold anthem.

I can turn research into labels of an intermingled story

of fear: Jewish exile, Maxwell street peddlers, Yiddish heckling, race riots,

red-lining, Hansberry, Black Belt, housing covenants, bombings,

Brooks, public housing kitchenettes, highways constructed,

Jewish migration, white flight, suburban refuge, Black migration.

I am trying to tell a story about my family’s roots

in Chicago. I listen to the boat tour guide’s bullet-pointed,

gentrified history of the Chicago River’s transformation –

the magical reversal of the water’s flow, Black families evicted

as Cabrini Green is demolished for glittering condos with River boardwalks.

Beyond streets of boarded up stores, rich chocolate rises over the River

from the Blommers factory, a tease within a wound.

This city is covered in bruises and love poems.

I drive home across the Ohio Street bridge at sunset

as downtown Chicago glistens all around like a child’s star-filled eye.

By Jamie Wendt

From: United States

Website: http://jamiewendt.wordpress.com