Anne Frank's Chestnut Tree
"Two Voices at the Window"
I.
Gilbert says: risk delight.
Hillesum says nothing so bold —
she just keeps writing, in the barracks,
that the sky is still that blue,
the jasmine still smells the way it always did.
Not a philosophy. A report.
~
II.
I imagine them at the same window.
Gilbert points at the harbor, the one light burning.
Hillesum looks past him, at the wire,
and says: yes — and still, this.
Two ways of refusing
to let the dark have the only word.
~
III.
She does not ask to be spared.
She asks only that the world not be reduced —
that even here, a moment can stay whole,
not a symbol, not a lesson,
just true.
That is harder than delight.
Delight I can choose on a good morning.
What she is describing
is fidelity to what is beautiful
even while it is killing her.
~
IV.
I have called this grace before.
Now I wonder if it is closer to witness —
the refusal to let suffering
edit the whole of what's real.
~
V.
Burns waited for death to bring the recompense.
Gilbert found it at the oars.
Hillesum found it already here,
inside the very thing
that should have erased it.
Three answers.
Only one of them
was written by someone
who did not survive to revise it.
~
VI.
So — coffee, still hot.
His voice, still his.
The sentence I wrote this morning
that did not need to be beautiful
to be true.
Not despite what still hurts.
Not after.
In the same room as it,
unedited,
still blue.
~
VII.
This one sits beside the amends letter,
beside Sophia walking into the dark
and calling it by name.
Same window. Different hour.
The costume comes off again.
What's underneath
is still enough.
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