After Dorothy’s Death

I awaken from dreams
un-remembering,
as if nocturnal photographs
shattered a plan
turned
in the moment of death
unendurable.
Now my sister is gone
our father and mother years asleep,
our brother a dead poem,
I am in process myself
of deadening,
of un-becoming
one I hate to know
of re-becoming in-
to another,
always another -
I'd hope to know.

-Esther Altshul Helfgott

March 2005 - 3 months after Dorothy died