Melanie Maier Poetry - Book Excerpts

September 11, 2001,
in this ghetto museum
conversation seeps through closed windows
from the world outside.
At first I think it's on the tape playing inside
of children's voices — ghosts.
Our elderly jewish guide tells me
I remind her of a cousin who lived in Austria.

Really, it's uncanny she says.
Ghosts: at the cemetery and crematorium,
where we walk among ovens, long cold,
still caked with ash.
Our guide says most Americans don't understand
what war does, we're just too removed.
At home it rains white ash and dust
onto the streets of New York, onto all of us.