Promethea, the Shoah, and pains of the heart

This morning I needed to read and think about the Song of Songs.  I got up but didn't want to go.  C. was sleeping.  The Sharuv winds had dissipated leaving cool winds from the north, from Hermon, from the Lebanon.  I got up to go but he said don't leave me... so I stayed a little longer... and then I left to go to Mamilla where I thought I could find a quiet warm spot in a cafe overlooking the garden quarter outside Jaffa gate.  I did.  And then I read Promethea, the last part where H. talks about love for Promethea, and the world with its bulls horns and heart moist like a river but torn together and apart.  Something in the womb I had constructed in the cafe made the words in Promethea intense and I felt every one this morning.  And then the sirens blasted and everything in the city stopped.  Stopped to remember the deaths of 6 million children, 6 million who once were children and now ash.  And every eye was touched with the pain of remembering and an old man stood in the cafe and cried.  And because at that moment I was already undone by Promethea, words on a page, a book, but a book of books, the siren and the eye unblinking and the silence and the blast and the stop pierced me and I felt entirely broken and in pain.  Which I can't understand because I'm too small.  My soul isn't pure enough for noble pain written down and the memory of the world.  I left the cafe and went to buy some stamps.  And the woman who I bought the stamps from offered me a phone card.  And I wanted to be sick because my heart was still in my throat and I couldnt breathe.