The little box held a necklace once,
was unmarked white once.
Now: grey outlines the silhouettes
of a string of beads --
pale circles spiraling upward,
a pattern like rising smoke --
a tiny bell that was a pendant,
and a set of Hebrew words
that was a silver earring.

I saw the fire start.
If I'd slept just a little longer,
we might never have wakened.

The night before,
my sister piled clothes in and around
the suitcase on her bed.
Three weeks, and she leaves for her year in a Jerusalem seminary.
A year's wardrobe -- is two suitcases and a duffelbag enough?

Smoke and water
have painted a forest on my wall:
dead black trees and dirty snow
behind cracked and blackened posters.

This afternoon
the only intact thing in my sister's room
is the metal frame where the mattress rested.
The mattress is wet ash,
surrounding one suitcase handle, black, half-melted.

This afternoon
sorting through remnants,
too much of it not worth keeping --
I am looking down at a jewelry box,
edges black and shading to grey.

Ten days ago, my brother got married.
The wedding service ends
with the ritual breaking of a glass underfoot,
to remember the burning of the Holy Temple.

Smoke-grey, char-grey,
soft pale circles in a rising spiral,
Hebrew letters pale against grey:

If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
may my right hand forget itself.

Glass crunches under my feet
as I stand to take the box downstairs,
to keep,
to remember.

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* Literally, "destruction of the house"; a term used to refer to the destruction of the Holy Temple. Pronounced with long vowels and an aspirated CH (as in loch or Bach), both words accented on the first syllable.