V. The Candle Burns
MY COUNTRY
Dove of muteness, pearl of the world
You were the pillow of my growth
Yours only yours is all that is in me
For from you I drew my strength
I withheld no step from your earth
I went to and fro
And in all that I touched your hand touched me
My country, I will forever love your land.
– Haggai Kamrat
translated by Esther Cameron
ABROAD IN WARTIME
I am impressed; they do not need RSS
They do not need to hide in their own place!
They do not have to invent locks that lock better,
They do not need a shelter!
They do not need an Emergency squad
They do not have to wake up from a nightmare...to the daymare of the real
world
They do not need armed Guards and ammunition
They do not need to prepare an escape plan in case of intrusion
They do not need an “Iron Dome,” nor suspect every noise is a shell
They do not need to refrain from admitting they are from Israel!
Trauma counseling, also, they do not need!
They do not need to see blood, donate blood, bleed!
They do not need to patch their faith in man and curb their rage
They do not need to stand the test of courage
They do not need to develop Resilience and Bury and Bury.
They do not need to take into their everyday vocabulary:
Gaza, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, tunnels, kidnappings, missiles
And all the other dirty words
They do not need all these -- they are "abroad"!
– Sabina Messeg
– translated by the author
Tirtsa Posklinsky-Shehori
TWO POEMS
All the flowers died this summer; what remained in the garden was green
foliage in different textures. Unlike my usual practice, I continue to water
them, I accept them without color or joy. Together with them, I content
myself with survival, trusting that the remaining green will hold out till
the rain comes
*
The mulberry tree increases its wide-spreading shadow; the street cleaners
have already taken all the abundance of fruit that it shed on the ground
What remains are the flies circling over smells of rotting
What remains are the residents of the street laying their heads on their
collections concealed in plastic bags
What remains is the smell of the joint smoked by some young people who have
cleared out of here
We remain
with the pigeons who always find rotten crumbs to pick up between the cracks
still believe they’ll always find
And for some unknown reason this makes them happy
translated by Esther Cameron
***
waiting for the right lament
How good it is gray today. The day is gray, everything is gray.
The beautiful garden is gray
There is a drizzle... but not a “rain of blessing”
Everything is wrapped in its soul, reality is wrapped
so good it's only dripping
I wouldn't stand a good thirst-quenching rain
may the drops continue to fall,
to weep, to mourn… without stopping
this is the time to cry! to wail and wait
for the retaliation, for the fighting back.
I know I said something inappropriate, I'm taking my words back
I run along narrow paths… I run away I run from you
putting down my bare feet
and raising them… in invocation
This time not expecting a poem, but
a lament
I'm waiting For the right lament
What is the correct lamentation needed at this moment?
What about the fury we have to suppress
The wish for revenge we are forbidden to express !
Oh let drops continue to drop to plummet
The sky continue to shed
tears
Just not the generous rain
that came to wash away, to fertilize, to bless!
– Sabina Messeg
translated by Esther Cameron
THE FLIGHT
The airport is sad gray and sad
The planes hang their heads in blue and white stripes
Beginning of June gray skies
How shall we lift the cup of bitterness
Let us fly
Bombs in the north the forests are burning
Lone soldiers drown in the quicksands of the south
Beautiful barefoot lads
Put on army boots
Put on their helmets like a diadem
Tell me
Where is Gate E2
I hold you in my hands
Your guitar your bed
The soft blanket you grew up with
In another hand I lead the troll my soldier I am flying to the great world
The plane is a breathing panting beast it ascends
The skies are wide the radiance is hollow
They ascend
Soldiers march in lines to the village
Their backs upright
They sit down in D32
A plane takes off without applause
What do you wish to drink
We have already drunk the cup of staggering
What else have you on your cart
I wrap myself in the blanket of childhood I do not close my eyes
A sad airplane takes off without applause
Outside is the radiance of the color of amber the living creatures and the
likeness of a man
You leave behind you a contrail of blood
– Chana Kremer
translated by Esther Cameron
FIVE HAIKU
loaded pomegranate another red Rosh Hashanah
***
red bedspread
in the shape of a child
October 7
***
roaming red nova eye of the raven
***
baby bones
the second front
still sizzling
***
fringes on the front—
camouflaged
prayer
– Sara Tropper
DISGUISE YOURSELF
Disguise yourself as if you are joyful as if you are
happy
Wear borrowed white clothes
Disguise yourself so as not to shame God
in His greatness
He wants you to be joyful believe me
Act as if you are not afraid dance
as if you were dancing
there will yet come good days
– Chana Kremer
translated by Esther Cameron
TRIO
Euripides 400 B.C
When Death comes to take him
King Admetus tricks him and does not go;
but Death demands another in his place.
His wife, Queen Alcestis offers herself
causing great mourning and sorrow,
until brave Heracles volunteers to go
down into Hades and bring her back;
he succeeds.
T.S. Eliot 1922
On the eve of a cocktail party
Edward’s wife Lavinia vanishes.
The guests are puzzled, concerned -
where is she? Is she dead?
An unidentified guest offers to find her
and bring her back. With clever tactics
he succeeds.
Israel 2023
At a crowded open-air music festival,
an unexpected, horrific attack by
Hamas terrorists, killing, abusing,
burning, destroying, dragging off
hundreds of hostages into the Hades
of Gaza tunnels and cells
causing a whole country to mourn.
Brave soldiers go down into that hell
fighting the evil, to bring them back.
The last line has yet to be written.
– Rumi Morkin
A SHATTERED TRUST
My people,
my beloved children,
we stand alone,
in the howling wind,
in a world of abandoned morality.
Alone on this tall mountain of truth,
we view the horizon,
our humanity,
It ought to be
enshrined as holiness,
now,
prostituted to a world in turmoil,
a spiral of decay,
flowers wilt,
trees wither
before the hailstorms
of falsehood,
of broken trusts,
the bonds of trust
binding men together
the adhesion of society,
shattered beyond recognition.
Alone we are,
but not alone are we.
We have blossomed,
our land has flourished
our children, threefold.
And we,
as brothers,
have come together for a common purpose.
To create a truth so powerful,
So enduring
That it is impenetrable.
We will endure.
For the sake of humanity,
We must endure.
– Don Kristt 5.2024
FRIDAY AFTERNOON PIYUT
It was his habit
to indulge himself in that solemn passivity which easily comes with the
lengthening shadows and mellowing light, when thinking and desiring melt
together imperceptibly, and what in other hours may have seemed argument
takes the quality of passionate vision.—George Eliot
Those expanding hours
the pause Friday afternoon
portfolios laced shut
new ventures not to be offered or taken up
while waiting for Shabbat evening yet to fall
my breathing reaches ahead
Now—who are those gathered there?
materialized from dust and shadow
figures greet each other
thronging sketched wayfarers
adjusting their shawls or long skirts
stroking beards or trimmed moustaches
One fellow with news from the front,
another retelling family tales
one interpreting a text
perhaps musing on
what Spinoza demanded of government
or reconciling Freud and Reich
assembling smiles and charitable coins
comrades conducting spirited arguments
in tents or low-slung meeting houses
poised on their lips
a pipe, hookah, or schnapps glass
My eyes tear at recognizing them
I gather their epochs eagerly,
wander among them to inquire
where they hailed from
how they kept clear hearts, sharp
thoughts, keen knowledge
throughout those mists of time
Our words and embraces
bring us one week closer
to the joy of the after days
– Andy Oram
MEZUZOT
When we few now alive
have all died, remember:
We were men who groveled in the cold
wearing only striped pajamas,
our lives threatened for a crust of bread.
We were hollow-eyed women
with wombs shriveled as ancient parchment.
So we trust you to tell our story.
Teach it to your children,
Write it on your hearts.
Think of us when you are in your warm house
or are walking safely on your way.
When you lie down in peace
to sleep in a comfortable bed.
If you fail, the world will forget us.
Your children will turn away from you
and you will disappear from the earth.
– Mel Goldberg
ERGO SUM
The relatives who died in the war
have faded in and out of our lives.
Not alive,
But then not dead,
Gone or lost in the war,
Maybe once or twice mentioned as dead or killed,
but this is stated
With such dispassion
That it seems not true.
So I am going to Auschwitz
To give them life,
To find them within the ledgers and the Lagers
Within the piles of shoes,
Within the ashes.
For you cannot be destroyed unless you were once alive
So amongst the destruction I will prove their existence,
Like a latter-day Descartes, You were killed
therefore you were
And I will grieve.
– Martin Herskovitz
Amos Neufeld
FIVE POEMS
WE FILLED THE EARTH
(“Be Fertile … and fill the earth.” Genesis 9:1)
for Paul Celan
Did you knead us with such love from this hard earth
just to break us? Beloveds, conjured in your image
thrust back naked into earth’s dark void, night’s breath-
choked chaos. Souls of flesh burnt to ash, flowering
dust, broken-stemmed blooming black over a bed of thorns
clinging to each breath — our life-blood crying out to you …
Fashioned to tend the living garden, sow
and fill the earth, teach our children your ways,
blow sweetly in their nostrils the fresh breath of life,
crown your works with ours, fulfill our mission.
If not angels stewards who strove on your behalf.
Did we betray you — the earth you’d envisioned?
We shards of battered bones, gasping for breath,
our flesh of ash flowering blood-red, grief-torn, filled the earth.
*
TWO SISTERS SHARING A SCRAP OF BREAD
(for my mother Charlotte and her sister Irene)
Two sisters who kept each other alive,
caught between fleeting hope and deepening despair.
Their lives stripped from them — all they’d hoped for,
loved dearly. Did their love help them survive?
Ordered to pack home in a few rucksacks,
their parents bereft, fearing what was to come—
told cruelly they would never return home.
Wondering if you’d see them again … on train tracks
bound for hell’s fires.
Bombed, huddled in a bunker,
making entries in a journal, recording
boundless brutality, grasping notes of hope,
sharing loved songs, poems from lost realms. Hearts riven.
Two sisters sharing scraps of bread, loved poems,
visions of a promised land where they would build home.
*
WHO?
Isaiah 56: “who gathereth the dispersed of Israel”
Who will gather our dispersed ashes
from forgotten forests and fields,
from blood-soaked corners of the broken earth
where beasts once devoured us?
Who will dare blow breath back
into our burnt bones
licked clean by a pack of hounds?
Who will bear and deliver our ashes
from the burning pyres of this furnace-planet,
clothe us in flesh and bone
and give us a patch of earth to call home?
Who will ever again raise us from dust,
from the earth’s inferno,
the chaotic depths of the abyss,
knit our bones and mend our broken bodies,
and send us forth to a promised land
so that we may rise at dawn and soar
into its augmenting light
to fly to a magic mountain?
Who will hear our blood cry out
from the ground of killing fields,
from dungeons buried in the earth,
black holes from which not even light
could escape. Summon us
from fugitive clouds of smoke,
the ashen wings of the whirlwind,
from graves adrift in the teeming sky,
from unmarked mounds,
ditches we dug for ourselves,
overflowing gashes
in flesh-flooded ravines,
open wounds in hushed green fields
where we were laid waste
to fill the earth?
Who in the distant heavens
will hear and answer our cry
from out of the darkest of nights,
say: here I am
to stand by you,
give you strength,
deliver you on eagle’s wings
from death-darkened days into the light?
Who will ever again call our names
and walk by our side,
free us from a barb-wired wilderness of abandonment,
rescue our burnt bodies from a wasteland
of breathlessness — last gasps
in sealed chambers of clawed walls and screaming flesh,
from the utter loneliness of our orphaned prayers—
so that we may go forth to reach a promised land?
Who, after countless roll calls — unfathomable fear—
will dare to call us by our names
from which we were stripped and banished
after our naked world was consumed
in the gaping maw of that terrifying night,
and dispatched in columns of smoke curling into the sky—
an offering to blue-eyed gods?
Who will remember us (as we once were)
lovingly created in our creator’s image
after we were branded like cattle for slaughter,
our shorn skulls and skeletal frames bludgeoned,
charred corpses stacked like firewood,
shattered vessels so beaten and battered,
that no one would recognize us?
Who will ever again press us to her heart,
hold us close—like a beloved—
and walk with us through the fires of the inferno—
not alone?
Who will ever again dare to gather us
from a wilderness of loss,
knead our ashes into flesh and bone,
blow breath back into our broken bodies,
and give us a name and a home
that will not perish?
*
BEARING WITNESS
for Jan Karski
“If the Prophets broke in/through the doors of night/and sought an ear
like a homeland—/
Ear of mankind/overgrown with nettles,/ would you hear?”
Nelly Sachs, If the prophets broke in)
You tried to wake the conscience of
the world,
rouse leaders who refused to understand
that there would be no more Jews. They were being murdered.
Methodically. That shame would mark mankind.
You asked them to halt the greatest of crimes—
rescue the remnant of Europe’s Jews still alive.
You’d seen Jews starved, death-bound, dying — there was no time
to waste! Did the world not want to know? — to believe?
even hear of such cruelty? One said: I know humanity—
impossible … though you are not lying.
Death’s fierce landscapes had pierced you — wrought soul-shaking empathy.
You’d seen a people perishing, naked hells of dying;
did your utmost — haunted that you had failed—
described hell’s deathscapes precisely but couldn’t right the world unkeeled.
*
WHO WILL HEAR OUR SCREAMS?
for Emanuel
Ringelblum and the other members of Oneg Shabbat: The Warsaw Ghetto
Chroniclers
Even our death-screams can’t capture
the horror
we’ve suffered: random shootings, roundups, lives-riven, death-
shrouded — at the mercy of murderers.
We’ve chronicled the truth — cries etched in the earth,
in our eyes, not wanting to give murderers
the last word — drown out the truth of our screams.
Recorded our lives ravaged in the ghetto
though the world outside remains deaf to our pleas—
has turned its back as our loved ones are taken.
An infinite grief from which no one’s recovered.
Yet we continue to write and bury our archive
so you will know the dying hells we’ve suffered—
brutal truths that may live beyond our time,
beyond this world that refused to hear our screams.
***
JUDEOPHOBIA*
squall of thorns \ flood of rotting teeth \ cabinet of lost lungs \
shuttle-cock bloodied \ womb imploded \ serpents in the
waters \ tattoo drenched with saliva \ bird wing wrenched
from its socket \ salt-caked flesh \ ulcer in fault line \ punchline
trapdoors \ assembly line for iron muzzles \ wishbone jagged \
glass splinters in the stew \ headlines impotent \ footnotes
spider-webbed with sorrow \ lemon-sick scent of
bleach \
hard mathematics \ terrorist snake burrows \ dance party
death trap \ gleeful snuff footage \ fossilized cures lodged
in riverbeds \ exile exiled \ two-headed, victim|persecutor \
petition petition the ghosts
– Rikki Santer
*Dr. Leon Pinsker,
who coined the word in 1882 in his argument for a Zionist state, explained
the term this way: As a psychic aberration, it is hereditary, and as disease
transmitted for two thousand years, it is incurable.
THE STILL SMALL VOICE
I’d hold tight to Mama’s hand
when Zayde blew the shofar.
The sound would grow with every breath
like the flames that grew in our fireplace
when Zayde blew on smoldering coals.
The shofar curved like Zayde’s back
its wide mouth protruding from his prayer shawl.
When it quavered I’d listen for the bleating
of the white ram trapped in brambles
sacrificed by Abraham in place of his son.
When Zayde blew the last long blast
I’d let go of Mama’s hand
to fly away to Solomon’s Temple.
Where white-robed priests standing
on stone steps before golden temple doors
blew trumpets and a long curved horn
whose blast would last
long after the trumpet blasts had died away
until only a still small voice could be heard.
What if I’d held on?
Now when I listen
to the sound of the shofar
reverberate off the walls
echoing through ages past
I remember a shofar left
in the ashes of a synagogue.
When the horn quavers like a child’s cry
I mourn mother and grandfather
burnt like offerings in a crematoria oven.
No snared ram to take their place.
But when the shofar blasts steady
I see Zayde wrapped in his prayer shawl.
I again hold Mama’s hand.
I bind Mama and Zayde tight in my memories
and hear the still small voice of peace.
– Rochelle Kochin
THE CANDLE BURNS
BURN MY HEAD, MY MIND MY SOUL
BURN MY HAIR, MY BODY, MY LIMBS
TAKE AWAY MY DIGNITY, REFUTE TRUTH, NEGATE HISTORY,
BRING HATE, ANIMOSITY AND REVOLTION
BURN MY HOUSE, TORTURE MY EXISTENCE
BUT KNOW, YOU WILL NEVER TAKE MY FAITH!
DESTROY WHAT IS MATERIAL
DESTROY WITH LIES AND WORDS THE FIBER OF THE WORLD
DESTROY YOUR OWN PEOPLE
DESTROY YOUR OWN CHILDREN
DESTROY YOUR OWN ESSENCE
BUT YOU WILL NEVER DESTROY MINE!!!
I WILL SING TO MY G-D
AND PRAISE HIS NAME
WILL CRY TO MY G-D AND BEG FOR HIS MERCY
I WILL LAUD HIS NAME AND HIS JUSTICE
AND HE WILL HEAR ME AND PROTECT HIS CHILDREN
I WILL CRY AND MY TEARS WILL HE SAVE
AND HE WILL POUR OUT HIS WRATH AGAINST HIS ENEMIES
REMEMBERING MY SOUL TO HIM DEDICATED…
SIMCHAT TORAH…THE JOY OF THE TORAH
WILL PREVAIL AGAINST ALL OUR FOES
AND HIS MIRACLES WILL FOREVER ATTEST:
AIN OD MILVADO – THERE IS NO OTHER BUT HIM!!
MIRIAM JASKIEROWICZ ARMAN
REGGIO CALABRIA, ITALY
YOM HASHOAH-ZIKARON 5784 – 2024
ODE FOR WALKING WOMEN
On a day when I am walking with two women
in my neighborhood, over past the bakery
where they sell fruit pies,
cream pies, quiche, and pizza,
and the European woman tells us she's taking
antibiotics for Lyme's disease,
asks questions about my ear pain,
when the subject changes to the news
and how do we find our sources. I don't
mention ten Jewish newspapers
in my inbox every morning, don't
mention as we cross Ashbury Ave
and start climbing uphill,
the Nova exhibit in New York
extended another two weeks maybe to
spite protestors with Hamas t-shirts
and how a woman found her shoes
in a pile of shoes on a platform where the shoes
belonged to the three hundred sixty
dead that day, each one with a barcode,
and she found her shoes because she survived,
so she picked up her shoes and
walked out of the exhibit, heaving
outside the doors. I'm not climbing uphill
anymore, have led the two women
to a park where we find a deer
with two spotted babies,
then wild turkeys, and hear chestnut-
backed chickadees' chatter. I answer a question,
saying the protestors called for the end
of Israel and death to Jews. And then
we're walking on pavement
when the British woman asks about
the New York Times and I point out
they shy away from real numbers,
and she says you mean they're afraid.
I wait a couple minutes to hear both women.
Sigh because this is the first time
since a massacre in another country
I've never visited never wanted to
up until recently never felt part of,
the first time since I confined myself
to a tiny space where at night cargo trains
lean on the horn, pushing through to the next
town,
the first time that someone has ascended,
said they're not Jewish but understands,
and I imagine in vespers the women repeat
a prayer resembling the native garden
we've stopped to admire, how even
a single cactus blends in, not indifferent
nor hostile to manzanita which will outlast us,
and flannelbush with its buttery petals,
all five of them. And because as we
make our way downhill
with sweeping views of the Golden Gate
and we stop to take it in, the women
talk about who controls terror in
the Middle East and they grunt over
college protests, and then we resume
our pace and descend back into
the indifferent streets, where the burning
inside me has vanished
– Laurel Benjamin
GUARANTEE
(Habakkuk 3:2)
May you employ this gun
With stern righteousness
Kindness and efficiency
Determined to the end,
“Wrath remembering mercy”
In complete intelligence,
Our enemy’s doctrine
Does not allow for peace
As subject to attain
Even phantom pretense.
I offer this gun to be
A dedicated weapon
Cleaned, oiled, free
Of obstructions in steel
Spiraled minutely.
– Paul Raboff
Donald Mender
TWO POEMS
BULRUSHES
Daddy,
I’ve been so very bored with
your cornball
palace,
your kiss up
courtiers,
your dragster
chariots,
your zip gun
generals,
your stone cold
temples,
your droning
priests,
your bricked in
crypts,
your pointless
mummies,
and the rest of
Cecil B. DeMille’s
recycled
kitsch.
But today,
while the help
was cutting me
a few bongs full
of wild weed,
sprouting here and there
along the Nile’s
freakier banks,
I
spied a spindly little kid,
still drizzled
with some crone’s
broken water,
floating by
in a raggedy
hemp basket,
left, I suppose,
as a kosher snack
for prowling crocs.
Now that
wasn’t so boring,
and I put aside
my smoke.
Though the half starved slave boy’s
hollowed out monkey face
was mostly shadows,
his eyes,
sparkling like
a fired up brain
on acid,
grabbed my nodding skull
and yanked me
from my habit.
I
just couldn’t resist
bundling the kid home
to be dried, wrapped,
and richly suckled
at the buttery teat
of my favorite
wet nurse.
Slave or not, I thought,
that weird little bag of bones
with LEDs for orbits
may fill out awesomely,
and grow to become
my very own rainbow star,
casting a royal peacock’s glow
across skies throughout
Greater Memphis.
Yet, deep down,
my gut worried
that he’s dangerous
like an alien time bomb,
which might tick away
for years among us
and finally go nova,
repaying my favors
with bloody fallout -
vermin,
pus,
dead cows,
and worse,
dooming
my toked up perks,
your dynasty,
our Delta,
the Milky Way,
Amun-Ra himself.
Even so,
this thrill-seeking chick,
inhaling once again,
simply couldn’t say no
to those burning eyes.
*
STREET SCENE
August, 2024:
Neo-Nazis
swagger through
Downtown, U. S. A.
They bellow at
the startled faces
of passersby,
“Are you a Jew?”
I can’t help
wondering how
Professor
Einstein,
slowly sucking
on his
pipestem,
might reply.
Not every metric
is relative.
What about
King Christian
the Tenth?
“Ya, sure;
we are all
Danes, too.”
Nice arm band.
Nice fella.
Let’s not forget
Slapsie Maxie
Rosenbloom
and Bugsy Siegel.
Israel’s got nukes.
Full stop.
_______________________