Home > Poetry > Death Display
profile/howard-schwartz.md
Published: Wed Oct 15 1975
Salman Toor, Fag Puddle with Candle, Shoe, and Flag (detail), 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, N.Y. Photo: Farzad Owrang.
AGNI 4 Family Politics Journeys
Death Display

The Polish consulate has chosen my grandmother’s body to help demonstrate the impact of Polish funeral music—I am indignant when I read of it in the papers. I visit the display, and take my turn after a man who departs in tears. As I walk to the front it seems her head is tilted, and I think I see her scratch. Rushing closer, I find her eyes are open: when I ask she admits she is not dead. In great excitement I pick her up and smuggle her home. There, to her attentive grandchildren, she explains the rigors of hoarding food and keeping a straight face, so that people could become unhappy and understand death. But the secret is too good to keep; before long the news is out that she is alive, and there are mixed reactions. At first the public is happy, and the hospital even donates her old bed, but slowly complaints come in, irate taxpayers who feel they have been cheated. Soon after this, however, she ceases to be the center of attention of even the dream.

See what's inside AGNI 4
Poetry
Scenario
AGNI 4 Journeys Family Arts
Poetry
Recipe for Conception
Online 2023 Family Mysteries Journeys
Poetry
Mandelstam Street and Other Apocryphal Territories
by Jaime Luis Huenún Villa
Translated from the Spanish by Cynthia Steele
AGNI 94 Journeys Politics Loss

Howard Schwartz was the winner of the 2005 National Jewish Book Award for Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism, reissued with annotations in 2007 by Oxford University Press. He teaches English at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. (updated 7/2010)

Back to top