"My City" by Sarah Segal-Lazar

I walk up the Main and they’re there:

All my ancestors cheering from balconies,

Echoes of languages lost to the wind

With their voices like violins,

Playing a song that has vanished with ages

Its pages

Now ash.

But the past

Never leaves

Never fully releases us

Keeps us from losing a part of ourselves

That is bigger than me

Than my family

Here a community grew

From the roots

It was forced to pull up

And it built new foundations

And bore generations

It once didn’t know it would see.

Now there’s me,

With a dance in my veins

Like the faraway cry of a clarinet

Ligatures binding some part of me,

Back to the shtetls abandoned for hope and this city of mine.

So I stand at the base of the Mountain

Encountering

Five scores of history

Sounds of the buses and cars

Fade to horses and carts

As I walk to St. Viateur

Towards latkas and babkas and bagels

And something much greater

That’s calling my name.

Sarah Segal-Lazar is an award-winning writer and performer. She holds an Honors BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. In 2018, her poetry was commissioned by Montreal’s McCord Museum. Her essay “Theatre These Days” was published by Intermission Magazine in 2021. Her plays have been performed across Canada, including Montreal’s Centaur Theatre and the Segal Centre for Performing Arts. Her play Baggage was translated into French last year. Sarah recently received a grant to make her first short film, which is currently in post-production.