Welcome World
by Elizabeth Poliner
Welcome World the Anne Frank House is being renewed
I read from a billboard as I wait in the entrance line
atypically short today just 1.5 hours. But I’m hungry and ask
the pair before me a mother and daughter from China
to hold my place while I get some food. Welcome World
I re-read upon returning, the compulsion to re-translate renewed
as renovated calmed when I feel renewed the coffee
kicking in the jet lag lifting when the couple farther ahead
read their map written in Hebrew when the young
Germans behind me nod and smile. Shalom Mundo
Bienvenue Welt the words on the sign the same message
in many languages blurring into the truth of it—
this is the world just us seven form a world
every piece of the line is likewise bound to be a world
and indeed the world comes here every day waits patiently
peacefully to honor Anne. I’m just sensing it
then sense it even more when at last we climb the steps
to the hidden annex those cramped rooms still haunted
by an unimaginable depth of hate. No words here
though language her words have brought us here
the world now willingly mute a silence so profound
the only word I know for it is holy. We’re changed
we’re at least momentarily better and wordless still
we descend from the annex to witness next
the story’s end: dead dead dead dead dead dead dead
but for her father. “Most parents don’t really know
their children” Otto remarked after reading Anne’s diary
which translated into more than seventy languages read by
over thirty million is hardly dead. She intended to be published
revised in a frenzy that last spring she kept, too
a Journal of Beautiful Sentences words she copied
to teach herself what to do. She intended
and that’s what’s given the world this House this chance
to know better be better and I leave pondering the wonder
of her intentions being realized beyond her wildest dreams—
a kind of miracle but not the kind that makes any of it
right. Over the next days wandering Amsterdam I long
to tell my younger students— girls all girls— many of whom
already consider themselves writers their conviction
as firm as fourteen-year-old Anne Frank’s: you must work
that hard and you might just keep a journal of beautiful sentences
and open your arms welcome the world intend intend
even when your words take you toward that which you never
intended, up your soul’s and history’s hidden stairways
where you just might light the dark places you never chose to go.
Elizabeth Poliner’s books include the poetry collection, What You Know in Your Hands (David Robert Books), and the novel, As Close to Us as Breathing (Little, Brown & Co.), winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in Fiction. A new novel, Spinning at the Edges, is forthcoming from HarperCollins. Her poetry has appeared in The Sun, The Southern Review, The Hopkins Review, Poetry East, and On the Seawall, among other journals.
