Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.

Gerard Sarnat

62 years old

Gerard Sarnat splits time between his Northern California forest home and Southern California's beaches, where he and his wife care for their first grandson. Gerry is a father of three, seeker and Jewbu, physician to the disenfranchised, past CEO and Stanford professor, and virginal writer 'til the tender age of sixty.  He in a member of the International Board of The New Israel Fund, a lonely voice advocating for Middle East peace, social/economic justice and human/civil rights.  Gerry has recently been published in EZAAPP and accepted byThe Hiss Quarterly for February and Pens on Fire for March. "Just Like the Jones'," about his experience caring for Jonestown survivors, will appear later this year in The Jonestown Annual Report. Gerry is currently working on an epic prose poem, "The Homeless Chronicles." He has recently been accepted into a four person writers' cooperative by The California Institute of Arts and Letters: Pessoa Press plans to publish his first book within one or two years.

1986

It was the summer
of the Berlin discotheque bombings.
Past UN Secretary Waldheim was elected president of Austria.

My grandson came home from camp.
A snake crept up his arm.  
He was so proud.  

I told the boy something he'd never known.  
"I too got tattooed at camp when I lived in Poland.
That was years before your mother was born after the war."

My beibele concentrated; there was a pause.
Which I broke, "Do you want me to show my tattoo to you?"  
Not waiting for an answer, I rolled up my sleeve.

The serial numbers had blurred over time.
Though no more words were said, the blue left an indelible image.
We never discussed camps or tattoos again.

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