Maybe time doesn’t heal all wounds. Maybe the worst rifts between people fester and never heal. Then people die and the story ends — unless some poet comes along. Longtime Twin Cities poet and teacher John Minczeski stirs the ashes with his pen in his latest poetry collection, “A Letter to Serafin” (Akron University Press), reawakening old ghosts and reigniting old tragedies.

He starts with a big one: In the book’s central poems, Minczeski visits a concentration camp, and is jarred by the physical embodiment of the past juxtaposed against modern travel rituals.

“Visiting Auschwitz/Birkenau in Poland 10 years ago moved me in ways I couldn’t predict, and not writing about it was out of the question. The irony is that my wife and I signed up for a guided bus tour from our hotel in Krakow. Can you imagine?” says Minczeski. “A gift kiosk at the entrance, a required black and white movie of Russian footage when the camps were liberated, a tour guide pointing out spots of particular horror, who kept the tour on schedule. I was a bad tour member since I wanted to wander around. I delayed the tour and the guide scolded, saying that we wouldn’t have as much time at the death factory as a result.”

Even now, he doesn’t want to move along and forget — and he doesn’t think the world should, either.

“It is necessary to keep it in view and not let anyone get away with the idea that we can put it behind us,” he says. “Though we condemn the Holocaust, we haven’t in any way evolved beyond those horrors — the genocides in Rwanda, Darfur, and Bosnia are ample evidence of what humans still do. I worry about the incendiary hate speech in this country — movie stars and politicians saying they are locked and loaded and ready to take this country back. Back from whom — a democratically elected government? A president chosen by popular and electoral vote? We are not over the Holocaust, I don’t think we ever will be.”

But smaller tragedies need to be remembered as well. The collection serves as a living letter from the poet to his Polish great-grandfather Serafin, who sent a son to the New World, then died alone in abject poverty. But first he sent a letter to his son in America, which made its way, three generations later, to his great-grandson John. Yearning, regretful, and starkly poetic, that family letter made a deep impression on the poet.

“An aunt told me that Serafin was a difficult man, orphaned at an early age and treated poorly by an uncle who robbed him of his inheritance. Since my father and I had a rocky relationship, I imagined that my grandfather and his father had similar experiences. In spite of that, my grandfather kept sending money back home until my grandmother put an end to it. ‘You have your own family to take care of,’ she said. After she died, he began sending money again,” he says. These poems assure that Serafin isn’t forgotten — and neither is his broken relationship with his son.

“I can’t say that poetry heals the rifts. Like many things, rifts heal, if they do at all, over time,” says Minczeski. “Poetry acknowledges them and prevents them from being swept under the rug.”

Grudge-holders, let that be your warning. It’s best to make up now.

Readings
6:30 p.m., Nov. 4, Nina's Coffee Café, 165 Western Ave. N.
 St. Paul, (651) 292-9816.

7:30 p.m., November 12, Macalester Groveland New Book Series at ArtStart, 1459 St. Clair Ave., St. Paul, (651) 698-2787. With poet Greg Watson.