Dede Cummings holds a BA from Middlebury College in Literature
where she was also a poetry contributor at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and was the recipient of the Mary Dunning Thwing Award. In 1991, she received an award to study with Hayden Carruth at the Bennington Writers’ Workshop. Dede has had her poetry published in Mademoiselle magazine and Artemis at Middlebury College (undergrad). She was a Discovery/The Nation poetry semi-finalist, and currently writes in a salon hosted by the author Suzanne Kingsbury where she lives in Brattleboro, Vermont. Dede is a 2010 graduate of the Harvard Medical School’s Department of Continuing Education course “Publishing Books, Memoirs and Other Creative Non-Fiction,” under the direction of Julie Silver, M.D. Her first book, Living With Crohn’s & Colitis: A Comprehensive Naturopathic Guide for Complete Digestive Wellness, was published in 2010 by Hatherleigh Press and distributed by Random House. She is at work on a collection of her poetry and submissions, along with her day job, that of being a book designer for publishers.
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Die Lügen
. . .That Lies Under the Trees by the Airport in Berditchev, Ukraine
The Jews are gone. After they were led to their graves,
they were stripped and stood firmly rooted to the earth.
The soldiers had told a little boy that the bread did not matter,
“You and the bread will become one in the earth.” He fled,
naked, and scared, and never left that village where he still
bakes his bread. Berditchev, it is called. Life goes on there.
The faces stare out at me behind their bullet-ridden glass.
Memory plays tricks on me, distorts even their year of death:
Was it 1941? Or 1961? I know you told me that vandals
snuck into the Jiddische cemetery and shot at their faces—
even your own eyes widened at the horror of it, the disgrace,
the defacing—their eyes frozen in time, locked on the camera.
Those refugees came back to a village having seen, and heard,
their parents’ horror. Berditchev, it was called.
The wind that turns the windmill sings for them,
for the Jews of 1941, villagers once, whose hushed presence
belies the deeper roots, the real truth beneath the trees.
Ohne Lügen, without lies.