Pesha Joyce Gertler (August 4, 1933 – June 8, 2015), was an American poet. “After my mother’s death when I was 17 months old, my father took me to Brooklyn where I grew up in an extended tri-generational, bi-lingual family of story tellers, poets, dreamers, who lured me into the magical world of language. As an imaginative, only child, poets and writers became my closest friends. My Jewish immigrant grandmother’s need to work in the sweatshops (for family survival), precluded an education. Hence, she could neither read nor write in English, and through her, I learned how language can shut one out as well as draw one in. Out of this heritage, my love and respect for language grew, my appreciation of the magic and power of words.”
FINALLY ON MY WAY TO YES
Pesha Gertler
Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say holy
holy.