SHIRLEY KAUFMAN’S ROOTS IN THE AIR 281Much American poetry, such as Kaufman’s lavender petals and jacaranda clumps,
stems from that “stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf ” in 1923. And his poem’s last line
break, “rooted, they / grip down and begin to awaken,” fosters her “tree mak-
ing us / look again.”
Roots, putting down roots—the choice for an exile, expatriate, anyone.
Yehuda Amichai ends “Jews in the Land of Israel” this way:
Spilled blood is not the roots of trees,
but it ’s the closest to them that we have.In “Deathfugue” Paul Celan, who survived but whose parents did not survive
Nazi genocide, says “we shovel a grave in the air.” Another poem of his points
In the air, there ’s where your root is, there,
in the air.“Roots in the Air,” Shirley Kaufman calls a poem from Claims, thinking not of
crematorium smoke but of any dogged nationhood.
“At Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh,” she explains, “where many survivors of the
Holocaust, including Vitka and Abba Kovner, have started their lives again, I
saw a Bengal ficus tree, transplanted from India. In India the tree propagates
itself by roots that grow from the branches of a single tree downward into the
soil, rerooting itself. In Israel, fleshy white tubers dangle from the branches,
but never reach the earth.” “Roots in the Air” gets the tree ’s hard news and an
open question.
Over my head
the Bengal ficus
dangles its roots like seaweed
out of the sea, licking
the ashes from the air.
Sure of which way is down
but unable to get there,
one tree makes a hundred
out of the steaming soil it comes from,
replanting itself.
Not here.
The roots are shaggy
with trying in this land.
No earth, no water,
what are they doing
in the light?“Not here”—or possibly, Not yet.