David Waltner-Toews

A Poem Inspired by David Waltner-Toews's  "Roots"

(Click here for text of Waltner-Toews's poem.)

Abe Neufeld, squinting into the sun,
calls this place his home.
He has a stick in his hands.
I watch as he digs a hole in the Ukraine
in the middle of an untilled field.
He has wrinkles on his hands.
He has home on the brain.
He is looking for his home.
Three minutes down he unearths
a red brick.
Five minutes later he has an aching soul
and tears in his eyes.

He stumbles upon a well.
It is a dry well.
Eternity since he drew life
from this well.
Last time anyone drew from the well,
they drew death.
Clear life stained with red death.
The death of us, of them, of Russians, of Germans, of Maknovites, of poor,
but not of rich.

An untilled field,
a crumbling well,
a blood-stained brick. 

Abe has been led to this place by a local drunk,
his aged father, drunk, sitting crippled, rotting in his own filth,
propped against his dilapidated shack,
growls at our foreign presence.
What is left here?
I see nothing in this place but despair.

Abe’s tears fall on his ground.
His tears fall where they fell
eighty years ago, when he cried for hunger
and for death.
I feel the weight of his past suffering.
The pain in the contorted face of the drunk old man
stumbling towards us on his infected stump
hurts me. 

But why am I here?
I know no suffering.

I run away to the field,
plunge my hands into the dirt.
I find a root and grab onto it.
I pull and I pull,
pulling up the root that cracks the red soil.
The root is long, but there is no tree in the field.
I begin to yank, the root cutting at my hands.
Suddenly,
I stand in Abe’s shadow,
breathing hard,
the root breaking the ground at his feet.
I look up at the tree that the root belongs to,
a root that has lived through the death seen by this land.
I have found Abe’s root,
and it is mine.

David Neufeld