DREAD OFFERING
We sat watching the entry,
that led to the sanctum,
the chamber of mystery,
where knives are wielded.
You lay on the altar,
fearsome sacrifice, beloved.
priests cut with sharp knives,
their acolytes assisting.
Outside we awaited
saving word, or dread.
The high priest in green,
brought word of solace,
her heart beats well now
We’ve tipped the balance.
Not death but life
is now in the omens.
—Michael E. Stone
February 14, 2005
*
FIRST HEALER
The scrapes and bruises that beset a child
Are soothed away with smiles and honey tea;
The little hurts are smoothly reconciled,
And then another playground sets us free,
And soon the passage of our youth forgets
Its broken bicycles and injured pets.
Not that the loss of friendship or a slight
May cut as deep as any pain we know,
And leave our hearts abandoned through a night
Of disenchantment in worlds below
Through earthly joy and happiness and peace
Seem more a vision as our lives increase.
Dreams and ambitions on which rest our lives
Are less consoling with elapsing years,
And little to renew them still survives
Among our days to mollify their tears
Though sufferings are more than we have known,
We find in anguish we are not alone.
Some grievous tracts of body now rebel,
We lose our courage, our philosophy
Which opens wide the very gates of Hell
To voids as blank as hopelessness can be;
And yet I learn true healing is divine,
When I can say, O Lord, that I am thine.
--Jack Lovejoy
CROSSROADS OF THE SOUL
This is Neshama business:
an envelope of water, a mother’s womb
lined with grandmothers’ tears.
One grandmother brimmed with terror
as iron doors slammed in the gas chambers,
her last Shema prayer hurled forward in time.
The other weeps more reticently after the war,
secreting her husband’s art, candelabra
sketches shadow a grandchild
he never knew.
Into this capacious capsule of tears
a rock is cast, like Truth in midrash
flung into muddy depths, so a man
brimming with lies may break
into this world in need of
redemption.
From salted water and coarse loam,
a shard of soul gains shape:
The Master Cutter calibrates
each blow carefully,
each high pitched rotation
of the bruiting reveals a facet,
one more angle luminosity
to break the carapace,
body’s grasping.
The first blow is miniscule,
a hammer falls as they bury
my grandmother and I laugh
and laugh until a kind woman
leans into my shame-filled face:
“It’s all right, you loved her well.
There will be time later to learn
The darker songs of mourning.”
A couple of decades later,
Nehemiah the sculptor opens the door
of a Colorado barn: half-crafted trunks
of mahogany and teak helped me to mourn
art sketches mildewing
in the attic back home.
Another two decades
until I face the Rebbe—
I stand soul-naked
before the bluest eyes.
The corridor of destiny grows
less obscure, hammers
keep striking, each diamond facet
glistens but does not blind.
How to bend into each blow’s blessing?
In darkness one night, I glimpse
a crossroad of Neshamot—
all our gems floating upstream
to the Golden Menorah
facing the Temple Mount.
Only diamonds can cut
diamonds, only earth-worn
souls may ignite the seven flames,
as light spills upward
from down-turned flower cups,
each held by arms toughened
by this longest exile.
Whoever said that fire and water
quench each other had not tasted
the hope that tears seed.
—Vera Schwarcz
*
CLOSURE
Mourning still—
Why, I ask, the passage of years,
the contentment of the now,
the joys and blessings of a good life,
should have brought closure.
Insensible and defiant as a child’s
tantrum, the pain still festers.
In the sound of a woman’s voice,
which I don’t recognize as my own,
a memory how she dared not weep,
for if she did, there’d be no way to stop.
Inhabiting the gentle terrain of womanhood
stands a wild passionate core, hard-hitting, harsh,
protesting, death-questioning, resisting to be consoled.
Imagining the fragile bones of a child in my arms,
I nurture the wound that does not heal, noting how
the blue angel of consolation denies opening her gates,
my refusal to heal considered ungodly.
—Gretti Izak
*
THE FAST OF THE SEVENTEENTH OF
TAMUZ