263 Prinsengracht
Jessica Goody



In memory of Anne Frank

A bookcase blocks the doors, shelves
of fat tomes with age-rotten bindings.
An old trunk bearing the scabs of peeling stickers
sits on the wooden floor, its planks gray with grime.
Old cardigans, the moth-eaten open weave of crochet
is not nearly warm enough for comfort in an unheated building.

The scratching of your dwindling pencil
might be mistaken for the scrabbling of rats overhead.
Shadows flicker on the dark beams and rafters
from a single window, six panes which divide
every reflection into quadrants: sunset, starlight, moonglow,
and the play of light from dancing clouds.

You no longer bear witness to daylight.
What stories did you tell to soothe yourself, sustaining
your narrow existence with only your imagination
to remind yourself of life beyond this nocturnal existence
where your ears strain for the sounds of jackboots and air raid sirens,
blinking away the horrors flashing in your mind’s eye?

About the author:
Jessica Goody writes for Sunsations Magazine and The Bluffton Today. Her work has also appeared in Timepieces, Seasons of Change, Moonlight Café’s Poetry By Moonlight, Songs of Sandy, Voices Israel 2014, Bards Annual 2013, Voices Israel 2013, among others. She was awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2011 Lucidity Poetry Journal International Competition and was a Quarter-Finalist in the 2012 Mary Ballard Poetry Prize Competition.