VII. The Life That Is Shared

 
 

A SNIPPET

I pull a blade of grass
and don’t think of my friends.

I think of grass.

There’s much to mind in the narrow strand
I call on in this province.

A curled stem can be a friend,
it bends with the wind and stretches
with my smoothing it.

I should not have plucked it,
now I think on it.
                               – Harvey Steinberg


HELPING FRIENDS

I have a friend who needs help
and another friend who can help
They are friendly with each other, too

The first friend does not want help
The second just asked my help
in figuring out what they are to do

I’m not too sure I could help
Nor am I sure I should help
Yet we’re all works-in-progress, I maintain

So I am asking for help
from you, and hope that your help
may calm the coil of empty, pointless pain
                                                                 – James B. Nicola
 

THE ART OF LEARNING

The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind.
—Richard Powers, The Overstory

You've learned to lose when counsel does not work.
The childhood friend who cheated on a spouse,
abused or spoiled a child, or sold their house
too soon: When asked, you offered, like a jerk,
and lost them all to deafness. And when they
lose almost everything in the divorce,
or find their child dead from an overdose,
you think: Could you but find a winning way
for them to hear, would it help at all? No,
you think again, there's no hope when we do
nothing. Right, though, is a reckless virtue.
And thankless. Wrong relieves and soothes, some. So
the phone rings. It's a friend who's learned you care.
And you've learned to anticipate despair.
                                                               – James B. Nicola


THE PLACEMENT OF SOULS

When books are placed upstanding on a shelf
next to each other, we below can read
their spines. Within, an author’s soul, or self,
might be identified. One may mislead
unknowingly or knowingly and wear
a jacket not quite accurate to who
or what the volume is. So few souls dare
to take one down and open it. Will you?

When I take down a long-time favorite book
I read it slowly, savoring the prose,
the poetry, the pictures, the insight,
the life that’s shared. This second or third look
now, decades later, makes it, I suppose,
an old friend I at long last know, or might.
                                                               – James B. Nicola
 

ABOUT MY FRIEND DANNY ASHKENAZI O.B.M.
August 8, 1922

Last night I received a gift for free
You came to me in a dream.
You sat down smiling opposite me,
My friend! Could I believe what seemed?

I was stunned and overwhelmed with surprise.
But you gazed at me tranquilly
Is that you? Can I believe my eyes?
Yes, my dear friend, it’s me!

You said that it was all a mistake
You never really died
And you certainly did manage to make
Your presence felt. Your smile was wide.

So now we can pick up our fight from the start
Till our shouts at each other reach heaven
Tell each other get lost, while the love in our hearts
Is seven times seven!
                                   – Haggai Kamrat
                                      translated by Esther Cameron
 

HE SAID TO ME COME

He said to me come
and we’ll sing the Song of Songs
He said to me come
and we’ll complete all the beginnings
since the days of our youth.
He said to me come
till the end of days.
We’ll fly over the bumps in the road
over the deadly viruses
we’ll close our eyes and row in the clouds
we’ll hum old songs
we’ll forget the masks
we’ll sweeten the endings,
we’ll crumple all longings
into the time that remains.
He said to me come.
                                 – Rachel Saidoff
                                    translated by Esther Cameron


THE CLOSEST THING I CAN GET TO A LOVE POEM

A coffee-stained notebook, three razor blades,
and a hair brush remain on the swivel chair while
the desk is covered in dishes threatening mold at any
moment along with empty cans of seltzer and cheap beer, a flannel shirt and a stale loaf of Italian bread

the floor is littered with amateur sociological observations:
bags of notes on the Combahee River Collective,
some dam in Brazil that displaced vulnerable populations,
and every sobering statistic you can find on union decline

unread newspapers blanket the bed, the pillows
are books written by Howard Becker and James Joyce
and Jean Paul Sartre: a half-read Ulysses props up the head
quite well when the dust from the room gives me sinus issues

Morrissey wails and a plush purple cat stares
at the wall with a stitched smile
when suddenly there’s a knock at the door

you set your glasses beside an unwashed
wine glass, pick up my guitar and begin playing,
never uttering a single complaint about
the maze of inventory you had to navigate
to make your way to my neglected instrument.
                                                                       – Alex LeGrys
 

LOVE LETTER

Like the obstreperous old Greek gods
I have to again self-transform.
This time to sensible, practical, and mannerly
To be able to disarm and overcome
Your resistance, and why not,
To my impatience, illogic, and inconsideration
Almost as indomitable as Crete’s
Long wall of sharp-edged peaks.
Justly, I am most amazed to see
This new animal standing in the old space
I had once occupied. But even if true
I can hardly stand the tedious boredom
Of this new worthy presentable me
Appealing to you in this letter.
Please, consider well and do not accept it.
                                                                 – Paul Raboff
 

MY SISTER’S MARRIAGE

I feel free at last to grant your request,
to stay up late and become a modern wife,
to a traveller from a distant land,
a man who arrived with a faded past,
a truckload of nuclear character, a peanut of virtue,
whose mood slices the lightning arching towards you,
with his tongue lashing out at your frequent moons.
His heart appears to be a temple of temper,
where traces of tantrums drop into a skillet
like boulders from a volcanic mountain
and his smiles disintegrate like a fly
dropping its dry wings on a rugged floor.
There must be something about his bearings,
where nothing besides mundane remains
except for the excessive ruins or dissipation
of what would have been a saving grace.
I tried to cancel my negativity towards him,
hoping that something good comes from this blather,
yet I see your future sprawled before me
like a squeezed rag in a muddy lake,
where the shimmer of dirt is the only attraction I see,
and nothing pushes you towards the edge
than my resistance to your faith in a phantom.
So often do lichens glitter in the cold sun,
but collapse is the fate of such lovely downwind
with its shiny radiation mistaken for a glowing change.
I wash my hands of your robotic love and pride
in anarchy masquerading as simple charm,
where deception wears the hues of pageantry,
and concealed violence parades as self-control.
When this hot wind blasts our delicate shores,
and burns up the little vestiges of love and joy we share,
I will not float with a hint of gloating,
but stretch my arms to catch your falling body,
my sister, my family, forever mine.
                                                     – Jonathan Chibuike Ukah
 

IF CHAGALL’S FLYING GOATS COULD COMFORT MOURNERS

Every word I speak now is a prayer,
that you lie undreaming in sweet comfort,
that you do not judge my intermittent cheerfulness,
my lack of tears when I turn to you to share
my soliloquies and you’re not here.
Nor do I speak out loud, as if you are. Instead,
I think back to times I made you laugh,
turning certain fraught events into private punch lines.
Some siblings part forever over scraps.
Half a syllable’s misspoken, they lose the jokes,
the recipes, the wry allusions.
Sister, no one shares my sudden memories,
but here’s mercy, your jacket’s in my closet, you’re floating
over my roof, my left shoulder.
                                                  – Florence Weinberger
 

MY FATHER

Though born with Elizabeth Bishop he died
long after, he loved my poems
because they were mine,
father remained as innocent as a child’s laughter:
and in seven languages knew no rhyme.
                                                             – Michael Salcman
 

THE ARMCHAIR

In the old house, when we moved away,
there remained a small armchair made of straw,
a bit faded, a bit tattered.
Little fibers already exceeded
their authority and stuck out between the slats.
But that was my father’s armchair, may he rest in peace,
which he’d bought from an Arab peddler in the village,
on which he sat for many of the years of his life
over the old well in the courtyard of our house
sometimes with a cobbler’s last between his knees for repairing shoes
sometimes with an awl in his hand for punching a belt
sometimes with a hammer for fixing at table or a chair
sometimes with the handle of a pot or the handle of a lid.
Toward the end of his life he plaited flowers
from nylon or silk
roses and lilies in different colors
for the family, the grandchildren…
Now the armchair is orphaned
The house has been sold to strangers.
Only longing
remains from those days.
                                         – Rachel Saidoff
                                            translated by Esther Cameron
 

home is

where I grow up their house bellybutton of my being secure cove to go back to when I leave for other lands till they retire snowbirds winging south still my compass seeks them out trying to relocate home then my children are born affirming my life leave to unfurl their wings and come back again bringing their own children home is where my offspring grow up my house bellybutton of their being
                                                 – Bob Findysz
 

THE PLACE
2015

It was eighth day Passover there
Shabbat Isru Chag here.
He was there
and I was here.
How guilty I felt,
I was inconsolable,
couldn’t be comforted,
whenever I needed him
he was there for me,
but when he passed on
I wasn't there for him.
I was far far away,
I was in this place,
albeit a holy place,
and he was in that place,
a less holy place.

When people visited me, they said
"May HaMakom, The Place,
comfort you amongst other mourners
for Zion and Jerusalem".

Now, each year on Isru Chag
I say Kaddish for him
and I recall, that just as they said,
the place was my comfort,
I was in the place that he wished for me,
I was in the place he wished he could be.
I didn’t need to feel guilty
I was there for him, as he was for me.
                                                          – Julian Alper
* Isru Chag – the day after the festival


IN MY MEMORY

In the gray before dawn
I dream of the dead and lost
they come to me calm
and give words
the words are awry
I don’t know how I understand and
why I don’t take these moments
before the lighting of dawn
to speak what I have held so long

Where are you?
Attendez-moi.
I so regret….
Where do the violets go in snow?

Would my own words be misspoken
misunderstood
Did anyone, in fact, understand or need to?
I miss their words
In my memory
words are what I keep.
                                    – Susan Oleferuk


PRAYER FOR MY NEIGHBORS

I saw them. I saw them suddenly go
from sidewalk to street, from street to gutter
as police cars circled and spun in the dark.
I saw them, children really, guns drawn,
heard the first shots, heard the last, heard
the voices of cops in the night, smelled fear
and gasoline, tasted metal night and horror,
shut my eyes—I did not want to see my hands
trembling, did not want anything I’d have
to remember. But I do remember. Do see
what shut eyes failed to stay blind to: lost
innocence, the face of a schoolboy turned to
prey.
          – Kelley Jean White
 

 

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