- I'm Jerry Mirskin, this poem is entitled, "Cooperation".

As if behind a screen, firm, resolved, knowing, or not, there is great cooperation.

Look at the workers over there, how they stand and look away, courteously, cupping their cigarettes, combing their hair that has become wet in the rain.

Or how the young rabbi explains the Hebrew word for cemetery means house of worlds.

And a city of stones crops up, sentient and oblique.

The last thing she said to me was live.

She said it three times.

She was my beginning in America.

The fur of her coat.

The kisses kissed.

Hands waving over candles on the stove.

I need one life to live, and one to be nostalgic.

Nostalgic for the crumbs of her semi-sweet cookies.

For the tone of pogrom that was always in her voice.

Live, she said, sitting in a wheelchair outside her building in the Bronx.

Her blue eyes neither sea nor sky.

The rabbi beckons us to come forward, to take part, take shovel.

For real, he says, not symbolic.

My grandmother's words board a train, then a ship.

They take passage for a time on the infinity of waves.

When they arrive, they fill out forms.

Listen, what I'm trying to say is she did not tell me to be happy, or gentle, or loving, or good.

Burying, the rabbi said, is one of the most loving things you can do for another.

This was his blessing.

Live, she said, live.

Giving me her blessing, live, whole and undivided.

In most cases I would stop here, just telling it like it is.

But I had further to go.

I climbed onto the pile of earth, the soil, the original body of the world, and started shoveling.

My wedding shoes sinking into the loose dirt.

There was great cooperation.

("The Star-Spangled Banner")