Yesterday

by Mendek Rubin

For the greater part of my life, I labored in pain.


I wanted to be happy today, yet I hung on to yesterday.

Yesterday, in my memory, I am a lost little boy, the image

of parent and child, my initiation into helplessness.

Yesterday is the image of an imperfect world, holding

on to my fears, the suffering of the human race, the Holocaust revisited.


I want to be happy now.
 Why then do I hold on to yesterday?


Take away my yesterday, and I am like the day I was born.

I am as God created me.


My mind is silent.


I am at peace.