Praxia Dymitruk, Praxia, Praxia
why did you write your name all over the walls?
Is this pain written down
or resistance to life’s passing?
Were you, too, afraid to disappear?
Without a sound? No one to miss you
because you belonged to no one?
Is your name all you owned, Praxia?
I understand you, little Russian one.
Such a sweet stem of a name.
For a girl so familiar though never known.
Praxia Dymitruk, Praxia, Praxia.
April is National Poetry Month and every day the peaceCENTER will be posting a poem about walls, fences, edges, borders. . . you get the idea. Walls that separate us, protect us, define us, challenge us . . . we collected these poems for our Walls Symposium in 2009.
Henia Karmel and her sister, Ilona, were deported from the Ghetto in Kraków Poland and spent WWII in Buchenwald. Their poems, written in captivity, were published in English in 2007 as “A Wall of Two: Poems of Resistance and Suffering from Kraków to Buchenwald and Beyond.”
