To return to The Deronda Review homepage, click here.
|
The Deronda Review
a magazine of poetry and thought Vol. V No. 2 2014
Jerusalem as the Center of the World (Heinrich Bunting)
THE DERONDA REVIEW: Editor: Esther Cameron., derondareview@att.net. Co-editor for Israel: Mindy Aber Barad, POB 7732, Jerusalem 9107. Hard copy $7, subscription $14, back issue $5. CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE Hayim Abramson B.B. Adams C.B. Anderson Yakov Azriel Mindy Aber Barad I. Batsheva Yaakov ben David J.E. Bennett William Beyer Carol Pearce Bjorlie Ruth Blumert Doug Bolling Robert Cooperman Zev Davis Robert Glen Deamer Courtney Druz Heather Dubrow E.P. Fisher Ruth Fogelman Bill Freedman Yaffa Ganz Lee Goldstein Leah LJ Gottesman Calvin Green KJ Hannah Greenberg Henry Harlan Jerry Hauser Friedrich Hölderlin Nolen Holzapfel Judith Issroff Gretti Izak Sheila Golburgh Johnson Marilyn E. Johnston E. Kam-Ron Stephen Keller Ruth Kessler David Kiphen Sue Tourkin-Komet Don Kristt David Lawrence Devora Levin Lyn Lifshin Jack Lovejoy Katharyn Howd Machan Constance Rowell Mastores John Milbury-Steen Greg Moglia JB Mulligan Cynthia Weber Nankee James P. Nicola B.Z. Niditch Andrew H. Oerke Susan Oleferuk Charlotte F. Otten Jared Pearce Simon Perchik Cathy Porter Roberta Pantal Rhodes Rainer Maria Rilke Leonard H. Roller Susan Rosenberg William Ruleman Ellin Sarot Steven Sher ME Silverman Larry Smeets Douglas Stockwell Michael E. Stone Sasha Tamar Strelitz Shira Twersky-Cassel Florence Weinberger Shoshana Weiss-Kost Judith Werner Daniel Williams Lionel Willis Virginia Wyler Gerald Zipper______________________________ Since its inception as The Neovictorian/Cochlea in 1996, The Deronda Review
has included a Contributors' Exchange of addresses (surface, email, URL) and
available books. Contributors' Exchange is now a
separate
.html file, and includes contributors from vol. 5 no. 1 on. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Shira Twersky’s "The Arrow of Time: After Eden I" and "The Arrow of Time: After Eden II" are from her book Legends of Wandering and Return; Susan Oleferuk’s "Those Who Come to the Garden" is from her book of the same title. Yaffa Ganz’s "Again" was originally published in 1988 in Jewish Action Magazine. _____________ I. Waking to Everything FIRST THAW
This promise comes,
slow melts an old white world -- It softens mounds of bitterness.
This promise lives on edges of green hopes – where earth soaks up snow's salted tears. -- Cynthia Weber Nankee
BIG HORN SHEEP AND ELK: ABOVE THE TOWN OF ESTES PARK, COLORADO
From our mountain lodge window we see cars stopped: everyone -- even us, inside -- hushed and stealthy as wolves, we humans armed, our cameras' clicks preserving the beasts, to prove to friends this world's a place of marvels. Earlier, our car was one among many stopped for a small herd of elk -- their winter coats beginning to shed, though wind gusted with mountain ferocity, the peaks misty with falling snow -- crossing the blacktop: to create elegant slow-motion sculptures; all of us staring, frozen in the amber of their beauty. – Robert Cooperman
SPRING COGITATIONS
What I observed in others I have seen evolve in myself: fear, black lies, depression and the pointing of the heart before wisdom dies.
It is mid‑spring. Ornamental cherry trees sweeten shadows of pale pink beneath tall redwoods. So the truth slips in through a flutter, blink,
before adults obscure the name. The old bleeds like a wound into the new, after shocks chill the spine, invoking fear in the young, the few
who can cradle a flame against the dark, a star in the silence. Tonight will be a night of triumph, returned now to my old insight
my dreams will flow like eternity through the river maze of the gone years, a hand will soothe the burning until our star's shape disappears. -- Calvin Green
ISRAELI SPRING
And as spring brings nature to life, So too ‑‑ in the Jewish cycle of life -- Spring signals the rebirth of spirituality, And the connection with Eretz HaKodesh is renewed
Joy is here with the bright morning sun, Chasing darkness into the recesses of our memory. Long, warming days urge the land's treasures to spring forth Decorating the land with the beauty of reawakening And filling it bountifully with the largesse of the earth.
Broad swatches of green, linger in our fields, A legacy of winter rains. Short trees of almond, orange and lemon Send brightly colored pallets across the barren sweeps of a vanishing winter Adding a pungent, sweet aroma to the harmony of rebirth.
Spring is a harbinger of a renewed sense of our peoplehood The Jewish people, at home in a land of life, A land of memories, of hope and joy. We open our eyes and reach out Joy dances invitingly towards us. It is spring in Israel.
-- Don Kristt, 5771
MY MOTHER'S REAL BIRTHDAY, MAY 25, 2004
I've let other obsessions go, tho they are like a bit in my mouth yanking me this way and that. Her last birth day in the icy pines, the trips to the doctors, all she got dressed for in those last weeks, in the blue suit she didn't want to wear too often, didn't want to wear out. I still felt what could matter was still ahead tho that year, summer never came. Sleeping near her, like a pajama party she said, giggling as we watched tv on an old scratchy black and white tv in a room already underground. Strawberries glistened. I cut them up with cream for her in a blue bowl. From the dark shadows of pine wedges of sky were blue. It was our all May and June color -- Lyn Lifshin
SHAVUOT
I remember when I sat hunched over my sticker collection, humming as I fingered each one, counting. The sweet smelling strawberry sticker, the shiny ballet slippers, admired and named --
like the stars each night, counted and called from their hiding places behind the congealed darkness.
Each is asked: Do you remember who you are? You are this one star. I name you.
And then, they are bright with the knowing.
The streets show me the places I am nameless, the narrow, leaning alleys and the spaces, like wide waves of sand. My presence is an echo caught in the wind with no place to land.
Pushing through the thick air, I imagine the way sounds could scatter here, and just a name would remain like a polished star, bright with the knowing.
Tonight, the sky itself that leans in over my shoulder and says, Stick to me, I name you, mine. -- Devora Levin
SAFELY IN SUMMER
In July when safely in summer unlikely to be thrown by cold winds of change the world is small dragon bugs, frail flower and twig sword the grassy ground a miniature land and one need never look up at what crosses the horizon. -- Susan Oleferuk
DESCENDING BLUEBIRD: SUMMER
In the silent garden, Beneath high roof Of extended maple branches, A bluebird Suddenly appears, With easy flash Of wing, Perches On narrow edge Of green bird bath, Lingers a moment, Bathes In the cool, Moving mirror Of the water. -- William Beyer
WATER LILIES
Today I've wakened on the porch to everything: a bussing breeze and a rippling pond and water lilies and coffee and mm it's good. You see, the mug I'm using has been glazed with a Monet painting. And when I sip I bring them to my lips which makes the coffee taste better, or seem to, anyhow ....
The first time I woke up to water lilies was in the middle of the lake where Dad and I would fish, He'd wake me up in pitch black before school and everything, the boat already on the car, we'd tied it up the night before together, and we'd row out for the bass, better than yellow perch. I'd doze and wake again, roused by a ripple or the sun or a nibble or his voice, surrounded by water lilies and shimmers and gurgles and trees, so many that I dreamt I had been drinking them, till I came to, weekday mornings, till I was ten or so.
One Saturday when I was twelve I went fishing with Harry. His mom drove us. We fished from shore. I pointed out the water lilies yonder, in the middle of the lake, but they did not surround us, they were something far away, so he was unimpressed. We caught a couple of perch too small to keep.
Occasionally, at a park or arboretum, I will pass by a pond with a wooden bridge in a Japanese theme, stocked with goldfish or carp, and stop awhile because of the water lilies expecting something, never knowing what. This morning dosing coffee from a mug I love the way a ten‑year‑old will love the least important thing, I feel the sun pop up as if we'd loaded up the boat and the bait, and I have woken in the middle of the lake and the lilies, having dozed in the dawn, and am waiting for a bite, and everything. -- James B. Nicola
"MEMORY OF THE DAY"
The wind blows gently upon my face As I watch the leaves dance to the song Silent and beautiful is Nature's grace Where all and everything politely belong
Last I was here, it was with her Our hands touched as did our hearts Memories now too strong to blur From my mind never shall they part
We watched as water poured over rock With spray and droplets catching the light It was if all else in the world had stopped A day never giving way to night
Sitting here now among the trees The wind to me continues to speak And my memories I hold close to me Of that day when we both came to be -- Nolen Holzapfel
WHERE ARE YOUR SUN YOUR MOON NOW?
Lemon yellow delicate wings of the fritillary gray brocade along both edges one cobalt eye on each vane poised impossibly on fuchsia blossoms of fireweed with stem so lithe the weight of a tiny moth no more than an aspen leaf nearly bends it to the earth O where are the sun and moon where is the universe now? where are the huge things a mind can scarcely imagine?
They are held in a half inch of velveteen flight my slight shadow huge as a mountain -- Daniel Williams Lundy Canyon
ASCENDING BUTTERFLIES
Thin, Nervous wings Of butterflies, Pale yellow, Deep crimson, Ascend, Descend Above the seasonal flowers, Repeated roses, Asters, A dozen petunias, Border of marigold, Linger In sunlight, Shadows, Within a small, Silent garden. -- William Beyer
THE ELDERBERRY AS A MEANS OF PERCEPTION
Blackened by summer (branches wizened, leaves crisped and curled), the elderberry struggles to survive its tedium on a slope of haggled rock.
Yet what at first seems bleak to the eye of the observer, who looks, then turns away, has second thoughts, and looks again -- alert to details, to furtherance of life -- and sees that
weaving spiders have hung their industry upon the elderberry's tattered twigs, have fattened spaces with an ineluctability of nature at her naturalest -- and sees how
morning birds in this morning's last-of-summer light bloom in and out of what was turned away from --
singing past the edge of things. Gone. Welcomed back. -- Constance Rowell Mastores
DEPARTURE
The whisper of a southland breeze Remurmured through autumnal trees, As hand in hand, with hearts atune, We walked beneath a harvest moon.
The Pilgrim bridge of weathered stone Would lead next day to worlds unknown; But now, our packing set aright, We crossed it in an amber light.
For this would be our final chance To dream together and romance, To fix a picture in our mind Of half a lifetime left behind:
The woodlands greening in the spring, When swans return and bluebirds sing; The hillsides preened in an array Of wildflowers on a summer day;
The honey‑sweet deliciousness Of nectar from a cider press; The golden pumpkins that adorn A farmstead rife with shocks of com;
The winter stars that wink and glow From crystal skies on virgin snow; The distant wailing of a train, Which haunts the dark like cries of pain.
And though this last of nights would fade Like footsteps in a cavalcade, Its spell will leave our lives beguiled Like tales first told us as a child. -- Jack Lovejoy
BEYOND WINTER
Look at that dull, dull dusk. No glow of rose and mauve, only that endless gray. A winter dusk. The kind that says Hold on if you dare.
Dark oak. Dark bay. Still darker shadow. Frail leaves pressed against the window. Your life: fearful and ripening and enormous.
-- Constance Rowell Mastores
NOSTOS
Winter light tells her it is safe here on the rotting hull of the boat upside down and moored, at the edge of high tide, to kelp, sand, and ocean debris said farewell to over and again. Isn't this what it means to come home? Sun low in the sky beyond the lagoon; a black petrel in languid flight crossing over the water, its wings curved toward dusk. Isn't this an image of what remains to remind nothing in the world is forever? Not the solitary woman on the far shore considering her reverie of broken shelL Nor the fisherman slowly reeling in his line. Not even this boat black spiders hide out in April through August ‑‑ safe, or not ‑‑ this boat, this abandoned haunt that echoes wind, rippling water and scattered light.
Flown into lambent shadow, the petrel begins its descent; the fisherman packs up his gear and heads back. On the far shore, wakened from her reverie of lost ships and bleached shell, the solitary woman reaches out her hand ... dispenses blessings on the ones returning home. And on those who do not. -- Constance Rowell Mastores
*Nostos: homecoming in Greek
STORM MIRACLES*
Confronted with a storm I feel infinitesimal. Snowflakes by the millions in artistic complications down.
I can touch but a few and influence none not to fall. Whether high‑minded or not the glaring fact is it does not matter.
A tiny fleck of frozen rain teaches me humility not gloom. I appreciate His glory on high, the richness of His will to us below.
Snow becomes slippery ice and makes me grateful to walk. My grain of security I owe to Him who leads me in every twinkle step.
Rain soaks my clothing and brain, as I muddle through the wind. Even before I arrive to get dry I shall recount His miracles today! -- Hayim Abramson
*Inspired by an extraordinary snow storm in Bet El and the area at large.
SUPPLICATION
Yesterday we woke and clouds covered the sky And the wind arose, and we rejoiced, for we thought That the longed‑for rain would arrive. But the clouds blew away And the sun arose, bringing back the dry heat and the fear.
Above the desolate fields the blue sky is so perfect and calm -- Will You cast off what grows and lives, and choose the inanimate?! What can the speaking being say? And will You care For the human soul when the human voice is silent on earth?
We are still crying out to you from dry throats, Each one will draw their own circle, men and women And children, and in the soil the mute imprisoned bud Will add its silent supplication: have mercy on us!
It is known to us that nature in all the world Has swerved from its ways, become cruel and grief--stricken. From afar we heard of killing cold and the giant whirlwind, And instead of the rain we were struck with a snow that broke tree and roof.
If true that the judgment of earth is rooted in our spirit, Then show us a path of repair, give us counsel To sharpen our prayer that it pierce to the source of mercy And wickedness flee, and the rains, O the rains come down! -- E. Kam-Ron 28‑29 Shvat 5774 (original in Hebrew)
[UNTITLED]
the oak‑gall‑wasp mortality's sting cells the air with a corky gall‑sphere from a tiny hole a worm exits to crawl around its course again
a day rounded‑out with its three holes in time a losing of the self in the rocking‑words mini deaths or births He's already answered the prayers -- Yaakov ben David 20Aug2013
[UNTITLED]
the desert's virtue lies exposed below the good-land's forest green and hiving
the desert's bad-lands dried to undrinkable water with deranged heat grimaced into calcified cliffs
a cloudless azure that sacks all a compounding that dissolves and opens to a higher substance above particle forces
the asymmetric graviton The Neshamah -- Yaakov ben David
SURPRISED
Three inches of snow in May wakes us up from Spring slumber; surprised once again; we have received the Torah in Exile.
As children we may have known, or not. But could neither do, nor go nor argue.
Years later when each of us arose Awent up@ to the Land, why were the adults so surprised? -- Mindy Aber Barad
_______________
II. Multiple Unity
ToE
A night supplied a myriad of crisp unflinching stars Bestows a period Of special grace When tourists stepping from their cars Find outer space
To be entangled with the inner. Mundane divinity Vouchsafes both saint and sinner The wherewithal To penetrate, to some degree, The glaucous pall
That clouds the humors of the eye. As solid as the ground Beneath their feet, the sky Becomes an altar Where songs are laid, though neither sound Nor vellum psalter
Attends this rite. A secret hymn Begets no miracle, But briefly lights the dim Perimeters That range beyond empirical Delimiters.
Too soon the stellar mood is gone, And travelers, dazed and weary, Drive off into the dawn Remembering Their close encounters with the Theory Of Everything. -- C.B. Anderson
THE BA'AL SHEM TOV or, A New Philosophy
The problem with religion is grown-ups. They don't see how, when the dusk settles like a soft grey pet on the tips of trees, the sky is filled with creatures -- a dragon spewing smoky fire, a whale slapping its tail against the purpley ocean dome, spraying salty cloud droplets against a peacock's pointed beak.
No, they think they are just clouds: cumulous, cirrus, thundery G‑d clouds. They codify and calculate like meteorologists without hearts. But they are blinded by the cataracts of too many nights.
In the playground of heaven, a cloud is not a cloud; it is an invitation to play. -- Devora Levin
[UNTITLED]
I had little sleep last night the sky so white I thought it morning holes in clouds revealed dark blue sky lakes white shores changed contours an occasional bright star floated into the blueness of sea -- Susan Rosenberg
TOAST
I toast thee, Night, With a brimming cup, Thy moon is up And full Behold its whine Within my wine: A coin in a Beggar's bowl. Remain thou rich With thy silver wealth To thee, this health I sing Thy coins that fall Are not for all O, but I can Hear them ring! -- David Kiphen
And God the artist through each strand of DNA paints the universe. -- Douglas Stockwell
THE ARROW OF TIME; AFTER EDEN I
Primeval plants anchored in the basin of rich red loam reach up tendrils to become orange‑barked limbs of canella cinnamon, squirrels scamper up the trunks,
Fruit bats suck the sweet asparagus berries, poke their dog‑like faces into the fleshy flowering claws of cactus flowers.
Within the convolute of sepals and whorled rosette cluster heart shaped leaf coronas of daffodil trumpets twist sun‑tinted golden petals to adorn the woody base of the first fragrant pomme suffused with purple in full sunlight.
Was the fruit of the tree of knowledge an apple or a pear or the whirling cosmos of that dimension which partaking thereof cast us into the progression of time where decay and destruction became the mechanism of life.
In Eden, past, present and future was comprehended and shared with the Creator.
Given Freedom of Choice, we were bound B like that cat that leaps out of a 8th story window to catch a passing bird in flight -- to choose curiosity. ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ Adam and Eve when the first sun set wept to find themselves in eternal darkness. The Sabbath sun rose and The Creator spoke, "You have chosen the material world, now seek the key to your living soul."
-- Shira Twersky‑Cassel
THE ARROW OF TIME; AFTER EDEN II
Cast into time, into the orderly disorder of birth and death the stars, the planets and galaxies emerge from great explosions into giant suns, destined to die in smoldering embers and collapse into themselves.
The arrow of time opened windows for life to flourish, heat and energy to grind down and then slip away to feed other life forms coming into being.
How can we comprehend the birth of the universe and our coming into being, when our rationale and wisdom depend on a morning cup of tea.
And He has allowed us the intellect to grasp hidden things, to view a red dot at the far end of time that was a dying sun.
Given us recall, to remember lying down beneath the thorned wood to embrace radiating aromatic rosette clusters of goose and whortleberries and each other.
In a time when white‑tailed deer and viper fed on star‑shaped violet flowers, living in harmony, and the deep‑throated red and honeyed lotus lilies sweetened the fragrant waters of Eden.
-- Shira Twersky-Cassel
EVE
You simply stand there at the dome's great climb Beside the stained‑glass window's radiant rose With apple in hand, poised in the apple‑pose, And guilty, guiltless once and for all time
Of all the offspring that you ever bore Since, from the radius of Forever's ring, You strode forth lovingly like spring Throughout the whole wide world to wage your war.
Ah, you longed to linger in that land A little longer so that you might heed The peaceful beasts' good sense and understand,
Yet since you found the man resolved to plod In strife toward death, you went to serve his need, And you had hardly yet known God. -- Rainer Maria Rilke translated from the German by William Ruleman
THE BRIGHTNESS OF PASCAL'S ABYSS
Qui ne sait que la vue de chats, de rats, l'écrasement d'un charbon, etc., emportent la raison hors des gonds? -- Pascal
Yes, we are all distraught by sense or thought -- the violence of reason opens an abyss. No matter how firm the earth on which we stand, if there's a precipice below, who among us, however wise, will not draw back in fear? The sight of a falling ember unhinged Pascal.
And yet, the unity of All, multiple, diverse. Each of the Thoughts linked to all the others and reflecting the totality; fragments like rain pools after a storm: each, though separate, gathering the constellations in a somber mirror -- the gaze of stars directed upon the waters. -- Constance Rowell Mastores
[UNTITLED]
I didn't think I was A brain open to all winds and wild spirits Seized with fears Struggling Constantly In a cell -- A tattered skeleton -- Cudgeling itself with subjects beyond the clouds
Sometimes with a kind of satisfying arrogance -- Sometimes with an understanding That barely managed To lay An outsize egg That would roll out of the nest -- Ruth Blumert from the Hebrew: E. Kam‑Ron
THE HUMAN FACE
In every face I see the halo of a fallen saint: A hidden journey through a valley of grief & despair Where witness is written in the fabric of knitted brows‑‑ The threads of wisdom from which the universe is woven.
In every smile, the thin veneer of civilization Curves around sensuous lips to a twisted, angry mouth; Agony vanishes into old familiar wounds And the bruised asylum of infinite sun‑split clouds.
In every mirror, the vision of a murdered god Wrinkled over the soft, kissed, daydreaming cheek of childhood; In the pupil of every eye, the inexhaustible Mystery of laughter confronting burnt cities & barbed wire.
Every hair, a fine distinction between sorrow & glory, Half spiritual experiment, half heaven's ambition; Cries of joy are on the tongue of every holy hunger And a silent hymn uncurling in every stranger's ear! -- E.P . Fisher
NIGHTSTORY
She thinks about swans, the woman reading, and a tall girl with tangled hair touching the fur of a silent bear who will become a prince. Needing
a cup of tea, she rises, moves to put the kettle on for steeping good hot black to prevent her sleeping before the clock strikes twelve. Hooves
of a golden horse keep pace across her heartbeat as she stirs in milk, remembering a gown of silk she wore one summer day. My loss
is nothing she repeats and then she pours away the extra water, waiting for her only daughter, who, hungry, might come home again. -- Katharyn Howd Machan
AMULET
I have some salmon salad with celery and onions, just the way you like it -- Mother said as I rushed to catch a plane.
Mother, I haven't time --
It won't take any time at all --
The brown bag now delivered, Mother kissed me, followed down the walk to where the taxi tooted, waved ...
Flying west, I forgot the food; was wakened somewhere above Ohio by a steward with a tray of plastic chicken, changed planes in Denver running every step, arrived at LAX to find my airbus waiting, snatched my luggage, dashed with pounding heart, fell finally in the only empty seat.
Following the sun as we drove up the coast I smelled the salmon sandwich, ripe from body heat and hours of travel.
I drew the package from my pocket and folded back wax paper.
Every single passenger, inhaling salmon, onions, kosher pickle, turned to look with envy, while I ate quietly and was replenished.
-- Sheila Golburgh Johnson
ORPAH
I have for you a miniquiz. You know, of course, who Oprah is. But do you know who Orpah was? You don't? Well, almost no one does. Now, don't become a history sleuth to learn who Orpah was. Read Ruth.
-- Henry Harlan
OLLIE
One day an otter orphan in a current was swept up to a half‑fixed beaver dam. He came to and met there another youth engaged in a peculiar sort of play
who had a flat tail and a wife. They weren't much older than he. AWhy, hello. I am called Oliver. Could you help me?@ They both had timber in their mouths. AI've lost my way.@
They grunted ANo,@ but that afternoon they taught Ollie all they knew of mud and wood. He loved the work and helping for a day. When they were done he saw that it was good.
The couple asked him if he'd like to stay but Ollie was a player, so returned to his old pointless, artless, happy way, unchanged by the industrial arts he'd learned.
Years later, though, he swirled upon a dam again, swept by the current of a thought, this time, or memory: AIs what I am what I'm supposed to be, or is there not
some thing I should be doing with my life?@ He thought he heard the beaver and his wife calling his name. Then in a gush of folly he swished and plopped again. For he was Ollie. -- James B. Nicola
THE WOMEN AT THE DOCK
The women sat at the dock at sunset all ages, all strangers none with a boat though there may have been boats some time in their lives as there were other partings for as men speak of gains and armies boast territory the women shared losses and expanded getting fuller and stronger like sleek seals on rocks.
Some men slipped silently into the water slim boats like sperm rushing off, sliding away like other men, in other lives The women though seemed detached sensing below the river, swells of the incoming tide and adjusting their sights like knowing sailors.
I waded in and laughingly fell the widow rolled out gnarled legs to join me someone's sister spotted a hawk and the young mother lay on the wood scratching her lazy belly her face restful in her own vision of the sky our voices getting softer, more serene we were a circlet of swans. -- Susan Oleferuk
TO NAOMI Song 2
o high fine pure shy intelligent‑eyed silv'ry‑voiced Naomi, Child of the lithe keen hemlock‑darkened far northern streams, Waking dream, Hesperides-seeking brave dream, Holy-living-Beauty-loving Beauty-embracing brave dream, Dreaming Almeda's high beechen Time‑breathing high gods‑keen Prescient green Island:
Abide by the high keen brave taintless pacing white horses, Pacing in the distance, pacing in the blue mist -- -- Robert Glen Deamer
LIGHT
I imagine angels on assem‑ bly lines making it, stacking warehouse shelves with ingots of the stuff, like Santa's elves, filling orders as we submit them.
And I think I've seen the fake stuff sold by counterfeiters, hacks and scabs who duck into hidden getaway cabs when a Sunday alarm is tolled.
The Manufacturer could sue but then it would probably get too dark. Since He refuses to take out a trademark, what, in the end, can He do? -- James B. Nicola
APHORISMS
The reach of tenderness is each; the compass of compassion, all.
Beware the logic of the loveless man.
As colors to the colorblind, is kindness to the cruel.
Cube is substance of a square; circle, shadow of a sphere.
Truth is simile; beauty is metaphor; love is equation.
Those things converge which from the same source flow.
Breathes there soul so shallow no breeze of beauty stirs?
Let not the compass of the mind exceed the heart's circumference.
Paranoia is the maddest form of loneliness.
-- B.Z. Niditch
_______________________
III. Cleavings
CLEAVING
To cleave. To adhere or cling, remain faithful to, especially in resistance to a force that draws away. Also to split or divide, as by a cutting blow, especially along a natural line of division, like the grain of wood.
Where has this word been?
In the flower beds perhaps, concealed among the lilacs and nasturtiums. Watching through a window -- now the bedroom, now the living room or study. Observing, researching us unnoticed, as for a project or assignment. Learning more than a word or anyone should know. Or we, in a thousand words, in all this cleaving silence could have said. -- Bill Freedman
COINCIDENCE
"I apologize to coincidence for calling it necessity" ("Under a Certain Little Star," Wislawa Szymborska)
Like seeing you walk towards me on stiletto heels in that tight black boat‑neck sweater, rocking those astonishing blue green eyes, Having no idea where you'd be at just that moment had I not learned, stumbling on the steadfast pattern of your whereabouts and movements over the past five weeks, six days, that this was always where you were at just this time.
Like saying, miraculously, just the right four words by way of hopeful but embarrassed introduction, Having no idea what you'd find appealing, childish or offensive, Trusting entirely to intuition, prayer, luck and the coincidental overhearing of nineteen introductions by assorted eager strangers over the past two months, nine days: eighteen failed, one unsettling but instructively successful.
Like knowing where to take you that fortuitous first evening, Knowing nothing of your taste in music or your dining preferences but what I'd learned from thirty‑seven friends, acquaintances and relatives who, for reasons I cannot explain, even to this day, gave me just that information when I interviewed them for a survey about the leisure occupations of young women of a certain class I happened to be conducting at the time.
Like knowing, somehow, eight years later you'd be leaving, when you said, excitedly, you'd met, by odd coincidence, precisely where we'd met eight years before, a stranger who seemed to know you. -- Bill Freedman
HOW WILL I KNOW THEE
How will I know thee To see thee for the First Time?
"You might just get to know Me If you will not insist on speaking Rhyme."
You might attempt to trick me to reveal my Birth‑sign. You might attempt to goad me to reveal my Birth‑stone.
You might query me for my height, My coloring, my physique.
But, you shall know me by my winter‑green Earrings, ‑‑ pastel platform sandals ‑‑green ‑‑
And you might just get to know something else, Somewhere, somehow ‑‑ in‑between. -- Sue Tourkin-Komet
FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TOTEM POLE
Beautiful is as beautiful doesn't which stands outside itself Like an aroma around a pear.
It is who you are when I see you from a different slant, A glance knocking itself against your improbabilities like A rubber ball on a window.
I slide down you like cognitive dissent, A relocation of my past attitudes towards you into a new place.
And you become fabulous like the first time I met you In the Hunter College cafeteria and knew that one day I would find
Your carved beauty looking at me from the other side Of the totem pole. -- David Lawrence
GRANDSTANDING
Walking past all the ugliness in the world I run into you At the beautiful corner and know that you are the glow Beyond the traffic light.
You are so unusual that I stop and go and watch You shift gears as you smoke into my universe like A runaway wheel.
You are so Daytona lovely.
I want to get into a major accident with your chassis, To roll over with you into the injured audience. I want to share your accidental drama in the grandstands. -- David Lawrence
SUITED FOR LOVING MY WIFE
I looked back at our President and turned into a pillar of salt.
He tried to rock and roll like JC But his results were bankrupt like Sodom and Gomorrah.
If I didn't vote for him why do you say I have to respect him?
I didn't start the war in Afghanistan. He did. Why should I have to think it was a good deal, Better than Iraq?
I am not voting for myself. I am not applauding his give‑away speech at Cairo.
The only job I am suited for is to love my wife. It takes a lot of work when your mind is contrarian, Your antagonistic compulsions are obsessive.
I pop a lithium. I see two analysts.
I am learning to hold it all together like a hand in a mud pie.
-- David Lawrence
SOMEHOW MORE
Belgium chocolate truffle Hug of a grandchild A lovely stranger's smile Pleasures
But to reach 'joy' ... somehow more With elation comes a sense of ending My love comes to our bed In a white that glimmers
I run my hand through her hair I see a face that unwinds the years So this is how she looked at 21 Yet with it the sense of the end
Not a fold of intimacy Instead this signal From the sweetest moments How our grace clings to a parting -- Greg Moglia
PRINCE OF THE FOREST
Princeling of the forest dappled like spots of sun on the rich baize ground the forest concealing, lending its color, a magical spell
Prince of the forest, are you strong yet to bear your crown and prance and parade your masculine beauty I think of you autumn mornings when the rain gusts sharp and the tannin hits deep and you raise your massive head and step out of the dark trees
Princeling, that day in May I had nothing to give you only a human voice, an unpracticed gift till the imaginative forest lent me its sounds each note hit the sky and fell to the deepest root an expression of man's great range the melody of thought and the timbre of compassion missing only from this great opera the sound of a gun
Gamesman I say what unfair game do you play do you not hear the music does the forest not enchant can you not hum the player's tune. -- Susan Oleferuk
SAMSON'S LAMENT
Then [Delilah] said to [Samson], "How can you say, 'I love you,' when your heart is not with me? You Y have not told me where your great strength is."...So he told her all that was in his heart and said to her, "A razor has never come to my head ... If I am shaved, then my strength will leave me and I shall become weak and be like any other man...." Judges, 16:15‑17.
Even here in this windowless world of mine when the memory of the Vale of Sorek reforms in my mind I am moved to tears. For it was there I first met Delilah, first fell in love. In Sorek I invited her in to my sanctum
only to have her, once past the door and I unaware, cast my gift of love to the floor. She let in foes who shore off my locks of hair, dashed out my eyes, bound me with these chains and left me to rot in this Gaza jail.
The hair regrows. My strength revives. But even if I could win back the use of my eyes the injury she has done will not heal. For now I feel there is no one under heaven whom I can trust.
Delilah, and Delilah alone, has led me in to a dark prison of the soul out of which I dare not go.
-- Larry Smeets
CHAPEL PERILOUS EXPERIENCE
The objects on hand seemed to eliminate the space between themselves and us, so in the chapel's garden the many, at last, was one. Bushes balleted in sync with our motions, and flowers wore our emotions on their sleeves.
We had completely become our surroundings, though don't we always become ourselves in everything besides ourselves, for what are we if not all but ourselves for the most part? What's left is a cubic foot or two of tissue and bone, plus some issues about our relationship with the outside world. So we knew what each thing was going to do, for there we were, like its transitive verb, every object part of the one and only subject.
Our peak experience lasted for just seconds. Then we fell back to ourselves as the garden faded, though we kept returning to the House of Eros, hunting for that time‑immune tower that was more of a chapel than what we had in mind. Such highs are what the species lives for though we're easily seduced by sexy ideas when only love can make humankind kinder. We have come a short way in a long time. We have a long way to go in a short time. -- Andrew H. Oerke
[UNTITLED]
There is a piece of me it smells of pine and rests on a shelf of a blue sky mountain another piece is hidden in the brush where the stream is wide and the willow bends it smells of sweet woodruff and sun
When I forget where I live and who I am I come here in my dreams swimming, climbing, reaching and I often glimpse you smell you, miss you in the cold night air.
-- Susan Oleferuk
___________________
IV. That Which Holds
THE TANGERINE
I look down the center of the tangerine and see the center, but when I tear it apart, all I have are two parts. It seems strange that the center of anything could disappear just by tearing it apart. Maybe it was never there. But I saw it. I know what I saw. A tiny, dark space holding it all together. It was there once. -- Roberta Pantal Rhodes
IN THE COMPANY OF POTTERS
for Dorothy
I envy the potter who taps twice and centers her work, while I, after six decades tap, tapping, have just come round right.
There's no place like Center. -- Carol Pearce Bjorlie
the singular beast
What stays in the center of each ring is the same defining hub, as any note can bring all of music to bloom, in echo out to shoreless reaches. Can a hammer ring upon this anvil, can a forge's flame redden that crude hunk of steel, and not imply all other hammers, forges, steel? A chain of snakes, each tail in its own mouth, links this to that to every other thing. A net enmeshes hunter, arrow, game; a net drapes over that. All bordering is center, and all rings, braiding, become a hub, all rims roll up and underneath to anchor and encircle here and all. -- JBMulligan
ODE TO THE CENTER
It's that which holds. It's that which is most like you or me, around which spins a dance of eternity, of distantly equal parts, so vast
that it holds countless centers tossed in a surging sea of cold circumference, so periphery and center are married, bedded, blessed
with everywhere a new beginning, end and course to run, a chance to once again continue.
It's time that is the center. Or may be. The spinning ring of past and future holds the dizzying displays of possibility,
the branches of a primal tree, roots echoing each twig as it unfolds the leaves that spring to catch and cup the light. To see
the pattern is to know a center runs through time: each moment yields its being to the flow.
The essence centers everything. The moment far from time, that happens always. A place not near or distant, but here and there. We bring
an appetite for centering outside us, are in time beyond our days, in places where we'll never reach ‑ if anything
we're more alive when dead to thinking meat, and rise to what we praise of us that is outside.
We snatch at moments that hang in air, bright and ‑ are gone. The petals of a flame. The way is open: we're stymied by a lack of door.
The moment is a center, pure and full ‑- the one that follows is the same but never can equal its vanished twin, its other.
The moment must be all that holds us to the rest, the briefest dream that binds us to the real.
The here is true (and now), and on the fulcrum of a place, the universe can rest, and if it shivers and totters, still the lean
is balanced in its shape and motion, commands belief in all the other centers. We might deceive the desperate, centering self ‑ but then
we'd cut the holy bond to swelling seas, which are each others' shores, to all we are, beyond. -- JBMulligan
ACTUAL LIGHT
He is where he is, eternal He is always there, being, His Self He is Omnipotent in oblivion a Selfless Being which is Light that nothingness means to flesh
But where is there: since hardly anyone believes anymore? The question is answered by Light
He is waiting, a Fire in a bush He is waiting, a Voice in wind no one hears He is waiting, the Light of the world while man assumes that he is (idolizing himself) as if that is what replaced His waiting
But as actual Light, God is in love with waiting‑‑if man could only see it. He is waiting, Light, the center of the universe.
-- J.E. Bennett
THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE
Today, the center of the universe quiets, sheathed in cloudy starlight. (Accepting rides home from rehabilitation centers brings dependence).
Celestial minarets peal prayerful obedience. Fortresses of servitude stay ticking. (Aided by jar openers, dress sticks, arm extenders, we cripples get by, somehow).
Distant gateways block the view from cubicles, while galaxies shrug theft. (Days filled with tests, medicines, also nurses, convey awkward therapies).
Once banished from heaven, civilizations tend to gape at their forefathers' ruins. (We wished to be able-bodied enough to help, but discovered, instead, other wisdoms).
At present, bandits remain hidden in the garb of interstellar peace mongers. (Making lunch, or flushing toilets, exhausts those of us missing limbs).
--KJ Hannah Greenberg
25. ETERNITY IN ETERNITY*
Midway through, the counting lost all sense: numbers were -- well...words touched and whirled off and the parquet extended infinitely in all directions.
I found myself alone in an old song asked to dance by a slow radio wave from an era where such things were done.
Lines blur where shadows traverse reflections beneath me on the wood as I step back, left back, side, slide together, promenade. -- Courtney Druz
*from a sequence of poems on the counting of the omer. Day 25 is the midpoint of the count.
THE CIRCLE
He stands in the centre of the circle, gathers, tries to plug in tentacles that connect the realm above nature to this unhappy world in the need to transcend physicality.
The circumference of the circle stretches many times over, bathed in all the colors of the spectrum. The barrage of conflicts, past disappointments accumulate; ghosts invoked from previous lives, other ages, his yearnings long time forgotten, claim their place in the circle.
Inside the busy silence everything unspoken waits the chance to express itself, insists it is important to be acknowledged. Synapses pop and flare, he is pressured all the time, tries to keep his circle steady as the rich undercurrent of life sways it. He knows he will be judged by what he absorbed from all that whirls around to make his life a testament to God's truth and beauty. -- Gretti Izak
HEALING THROUGH SILENCE
I am healing through silence. Because it is within silence that I can hear and listen to my voice. Yes. Hear myself think and discover my own inner beauty again, Without the constant bickering, confusion and torment. The weight has been lifted off of my shoulders. To breathe in the morning sunshine and feel peaceful once more. Daring to step out into the world and regain my footing. Putting on a spiritual armor of light I protect myself from cockeyed looks. I learn that self reliance is a virtue. Grateful for the small acts of kindness of others. Nature smiles on me as I meditate within the symmetry. -- Shoshanah Weiss-Kost
THE CITY CENTER
The center of the city is not the Square, it is not on the map of any part. The city's center is a thinking heart. It is the promise that we will be there for one another, that each has a share that is not forfeited when troubles start. All civic courage and all civic art arise on the foundation of this care.
For where all are for one, each dares to be for all ‑‑ to do and say as conscience prods. But where each one serves mean and separate gods, where selfishness is sole security, there freedom flags, creative vision dies, and the city falls, whatever buildings rise. -- Esther Cameron Madison, Wisconsin, 1995
LOOKING FOR THE QUEEN
Of the two hives, it's clear where one needn't Search: in the larger, every cell crammed with honey, workers carousing on the front porch on this sticky summer night. Neither hive will
Sting, so we comb the frames of the smaller for the single point where every face turns, wings working to pay an obeisance, and frame after frame comes up dry as hexagons.
The hive won't make it through the winter, though they do their work, they gather, they care, they spend little time underperforming, but without a sense of serving one thing,
It all becomes stingless, flavorless, that hive without a beauty to adore and for whom to beat‑out their lives. -- Jared Pearce
THOSE WHO COME TO THE GARDEN
How many visit this garden and some take away a cutting of this, a snipping of that a crushing handful, a scent of a fulsome summers day or like the robin feast indulgent luscious cherries succulent worms and some watch, cold as stone gravelly paths ending in thorn comments on changing buds and coming storm but one belongs here beautiful and true and this garden grows around her. -- Susan Oleferuk
THE SPELL
Because of wrong directions -- or so we thought -- we ended up driving round the same street time after time, a convergence of cul-de-sacs, east and west playing hide and seek in the black night.
Passing cars like pulsars pressing from deep space, shivered the metal skeleton of our car, and those parked on both sides of the narrow streets echoed warnings of collusion. Stray cats turned up and disappeared like ghosts, and we heard children crying as in an extended living room.
In Tel Aviv you are not supposed to get lost, syncopated by right-angled planning, a sea to the west easily keeps one oriented, relentlessly runs its course of waves to account for each heartbeat of the city, noisy, never sleeping, driven by postcard novelties, light-heartedly accepting all.
This surely was the spell locking us to drive in circles, perhaps for a while at least, wanting to forget what lies to the east, those exacting heights of Jerusalem that belittle all man's right-angled plans, novelties and certainties.
-- Gretti Izak
_________________
V. Eaten by a Land
TRADESCANTIA*
Inch plant, creeping plant, sometimes Moses in the basket or bulrushes, sometimes called "weakly upright," sometimes "scrambling," emigrant passed along (tradition of a sort), now peering from frigid panes, now dangling in high corners, winding within houses, lives, our lives, regardless of dust, scant water, less food, burgeoning, seeking light while tolerant of shade, stiff-leaved, yet despite fibrous strength, at carelessness, even well-intentioned touch, breaking but as if they cannot die, surviving. -- Ellin Sarot
*genus which includes the plant known as "Wandering Jew"
DIRECT LIGHTING
Anyone else would say it was indirect lighting, the way you came in , no switch, no flame. Inside was outside, outside was the same wherever you went for forty years, you trekked,
followed the pillars that protected you along the way from the shores of the Reed Sea to Plains of Moab camped, the Enlightenment was always there with the Almighty's stamp of approval, a testing ground to show you wouldn't stray
from Him, to take the promise to the other side, stretch the Tabernacle to fill the width and breadth of the land where you might trod. Confide
in its deepest secrets, gather its bounty provide, dwell there, abide by that path, take the Words He said keep the message You brought forever open wide.
-- Zev Davis
EATEN BY A LAND
My heart drinks milk My soul honey Sap pours up Drips from my leaves Tall wheat brushes my eye lashes As I pick crowned fruit Whose seed-filled blood Stains all
The road Heavy with wine Through walls of beveled rock Veined with crimson and green Dry thistles threaten My skin browns And I am absorbed
A delicacy Eaten by a Land of Grasshoppers and giants I can no longer say no And I have nothing further to report
-- Mindy Aber Barad
KLITAH (ABSORPTION)
I have gone forth from the country of my birth, for the last time have heard the robin's song, seen gold of aconites on new-thawed earth, for which the bitter winters made us long. But blackbirds here will whistle in the dawn, the almond tree console for winter's chill, gray doves will throb, the hoopoe strut his crown, and jackals raise their voice in eerie thrill. And most I pray the Torah's voice will fill my ears, as daily through the streets I go, and the land's air instruct me in the will of the One who gave me life, sustained me so far, that Israel may absorb my mind and grant me breathe its freedom unconfined. -- E. Kam‑Ron
QUEST
on he'halutz street in be'ersheva tall trees with purple blossoms line the way. newly arrived, how i wish to know their name. in each shop i stop. what's the name of the tree on your walk? in simple hebrew i say. but no one knows.
years go by and no one knows. could i have asked an expert? perhaps. to every thing there is a name.
in a tel aviv taxi today purple blossomed trees pass in a blur. so i ask, and he knows! a 20‑year quest ends on a blue sky day
with a singular word that sounds like a sweet song: sigalon. -- I. Batsheva
GIFTS
Old Yemen, Romania Woven together with royal threads ‑ Hybrids hung with pride in the market, What can I bring you? The bulging fruit vies for space with Spicy pickled vegetables, Is this what you'd like? Hand‑rolled vine leaves stuffed ‑ Will these fit in my suitcase? Holy garments for special days ‑ Horns of silver and gold ‑ To announce Messiah's coming. Will such gifts impress? -- Mindy Aber Barad
HOBBY: ARMAGEDDON
(Megiddo, 2006)
I hear him before I see him golden‑edged wings printed on the sky, unmoving above roofless rooms, the broken forts of Armageddon --
A hawk soaring over us all eyes a black centipede long as my foot crawling from the prehistoric oblivious of time atop this tel,
Twenty-six cities beneath my soles, Death filed in cabinets of stone, arranged by layers of time labeled with pink cyclamen.
Sipping water from a plastic bottle, I watch sun-burned tourists below spilling out of a yellow bus, seeking the beginning of their sorrow.
In the gift shop, Roman glass green as the sea of Odysseus, old as the idea of empire, costs more than bloody sand,
I buy a necklace made of shards buffed by 2000 years of war. The hovering bird, I discover in Birds of Israel -- "Hobby." -- B.B. Adams
HISTORY'S WEIGHT
Time compressed past and present laminated.
heavy to bear, breath burns, heart bids burst beneath the burden.
the past events places beget the present future's womb.
then is here is now. -- Michael E. Stone
VISIONARY upon a visit to the Zippori National Park
And Jerusalem went into hiding in escape from the Roman eagle's claws which ripped apart its sanctuary, scattered its gems.
Its legal body and soul migrated to a perch aloft a Galilean hilltop, there, fertile minds etched spoken laws to affix the code and mingled with pagans their theatre and baths, illustrious decors while remaining adherent to the faith of the Fathers, a vision of rebirth concealed -- a pact of silence -- in a Mona Lisa's mosaic glimpse
and the watchful eyes of a full moon that swore me to secrecy homeward on the Jordan Valley. -- Leah LJ Gottesman
CAP OF THE ARCH
seven faceted stone, eyes head of the building cap of the arch angled to take the pressure and support the rest
so are we here eyes see and yet blind think and yet obtuse but we can take the pressure
we in the land.
Israel's fate -- Michael E. Stone Shabbat Hannukah 2009
HURRICANE
Beyond the eye of the approaching storm, center of calm,
behind the veil of clouds a hundred miles wide,
pounding to be let in is the master come to snare us. -- Steven Sher
EXISTENTIAL THREATS with apologies to The Beach Boys
Could we see A-bombs from Iran? Missiles launched by Hezbollah? Deadly gas shot from Damascus? Hamas rockets in the south?
Someone let the angel of death into the house while we were sleeping and none know how to show him out.
This is the enemy that conspires all around us, the while claiming that his lies are truth -- and puts a thumb on the scale
when no one's watching so the lies carry more weight, the abuse then heaped on us will have just cause.
Someone=s tossed a burning match among the dry brush and young trees beside the highway to Jerusalem --
the way the first torch signaled to the next, spreading quickly hill to hill, the new month's start as far as Babylon.
Bibi, will you bomb Iran? Bomb Iran? Bomb Iran? Ba ba ba ba-bomb Iran -- Steven Sher
CURSE
Go off to Goa this afternoon go find indifferent gods leave the fall‑out shelters for a pad in the Village a mythic world of nirvana all on your own, where are your kings except in cards your great judges on revelation thrones your royal lines of poets, priests and prophets? They are entombed in scrolls of parchment. Don't you have time to understand the text it's all backwards to you, and your pierced ears cannot hear me banish you from the House of Israel. -- B.Z. Niditch
THE ANTI‑SEMITES' SCORN
"We have become a taunt to our neighbors, a scorn and mockery to those around us." (Psalm 79:4)
I hear the anti‑Semites swear all wars Are started by the Jews; I hear their scorn And mockery, how every shirt is torn By Jewish usury, how Jewish jaws Have slowly chewed their flesh, how Jewish claws Will slash the unsuspecting eye. They mourn The gems they claim we stole and now adorn The snouts of Jewish piglets, sows and boars.
I hear the lewd obscenities they use Against us, Lord, as if we drank their sweat Or poisoned all their wells. O help me fight Their hatred, God, their hatred of the Jews, Not with revenge's fire, but with light; let A Jewish dawn extinguish hatred's night. --Yakov Azriel
AGAIN
The wolves are gathering round, dear Lord, the wolves are gathering round. Again your sons to ravage, kill to crush into the ground. Why do you hide, dear Lord? Come forth, stretch out your mighty hand. How can you stand to hear the cries of anguish from your Land?
Enough enough the wolves have drunk the blood of slaughtered sheep. Come forth dear God and shepherd be. Thy flock is long sore weak. Your covenant carved in stars and sand in heart, in mind, on flesh. A promise made You won't forsake, a Godly kiss, caress.
Make haste dear Lord, the day grows dim. The wolves are gathering round again. The hour is late, the night was long, the dove, the deer, the sheep stood strong. But test them not again dear Lord. They walked through fire, were flayed by sword, but now they tire. They seek respite, Yet still they follow, still they fight.
Until the sword turns into plow, Dear Lord, we do proclaim, We'll hold aloft your banner, stay faithful to your Name. Your Land defend, your enemies fight, your children guard with prayers and might, until the time when dawn's clear light replaces darkness, ends the night.
But has the time not come, dear Lord? Your children all await your word. Reveal, dear God the morning star, the dawn's pure glow, the fresh new day. The night was long, the time has come. Hallow Your Name. Proclaim Your song. -- Yaffa Ganz
ANI MA-AMIN
"I see it, but not now, I behold it, but not soon ..." (Numbers 24:17) "I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah; although he tarries, nonetheless, I wait for him day by day." -- from the "Ani Ma'amin" ("I Believe"), a formulation written in the fifteenth century of the Thirteen Principles of Jewish Faith according to R. Moses Maimonides (1135‑1204)
Although he tarries, leaving us to grieve Our brother's death and dig our sister's grave With broken shovels in a darkened cave, The Messiah will come one day, I believe. Will eyes detect his shadow, ears perceive The echo of his name? Will mourners shave Their beards one day, believing he can save Adam's daughters and all the sons of Eve?
Soon the Messiah will arrive -- he must! -- And when he does, he'll teach us how to play With hissing snakes whose fangs no longer bite, With serpents that have ceased to eat the dust Of sin; in faithfulness he'll bring, one day, Fresh fruit from Eden's tree of life and light. -- Yakov Azriel
THE MOON OF JERUSALEM
"And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to distinguish between the day and the night; and they shall be for signs and appointed times, for days and years." (Genesis 1:14)
In the race of time, the sprinter was the sun Which quickly sped through days, but lost the race; When night appeared, it was the moon that won.
How bright the dawn, when the sun began to run With confidence, ability and grace; In the race of time, the sprinter was the sun.
But the sun, which lit up worlds all stars should shun, Reduced his speed and waned without a trace; When night appeared, it was the moon that won.
As hosts of stars declared the race was done, The moon of Jerusalem reached first place; In the race of time, the sprinter was the sun.
The stars took threads they earlier had spun And hid the moon behind a veil of lace; When night appeared, it was the moon that won.
"Bring light," the stars command, "when there is none, And at the end of days, reveal your face." In the race of time, the sprinter was the sun; When night appeared, it was the moon that won. -- Yakov Azriel
________________
VI. Border of an Era
FAULT LINES
We're camped beside the border of an era, But whether it's a new one or the old We can't be sure. In either case, we stand Upon the rim of an immense caldera That threatens parcels of developed land For miles around. Our lives are bought and sold
For tarnished Lincoln pennies on the dollar, And yet our coin is stamped: IN GOD WE TRUST. The times are named for trends in art or science Or in religion, though the Roman collar Meant nothing to the prehistoric Mayans, Whose calendar bespoke the moth and rust
Of sharp disjunctures at the end of time. A novelist emplaces arcs of terror If only to ensure his stories sell, While we who count our syllables and rhyme Say nothing of the creatures straight from hell, But scribble in the margin of our error. -- C.B. Anderson
THRESHOLD
On the new century's threshold -- unmapped exile of time and place -- she remembered a distant window in another country, where the gray houses would come to offer their looming shadows at the night-shrouded market- square for an awed child's soul to choose from, when a horse's hooves played such dark music on 'the snow-hushed cobblestones and the ethereal light of gas street-lamps illumined such infinite loneliness, punctuated only by an occasional church bell tolling, that she wished to go back to that severed omniscient talking horse-head and that barefoot goose girl on the black-and- white pasture of her fairy tale book- for that other mystery, which spoke not in silence but words, and knew nothing of passing time. -- Ruth Kessler
THE ABANDONED TOWER
"Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower that reaches to the stars." Gen. 11:4
I was born where the ancient ruins wait, an oval mound of rubble no one tends, and yet they named its desert town "God's Gate."
I was the lonely one of all my friends. There was a shadow in me, cold and blasted, my kin who clung too tight to life could sense.
While mother begged, sometimes for days I fasted, then went at dusk to climb old temple walls and beat my back with branches while pain lasted.
They did not speak, those spirits of the temples, but garments rustled, footfalls went by me, as if of many people wearing sandals.
I knew I was a stem upon their tree, roots growing through this slender slice of cloud called life that scuds across the distant sky.
My town was in a siege by Nimrod's brood. From nightly vigil I trailed on dawn's skirt to find my household in a pool of blood.
Such sudden tragedies seem hardly worth the effort. I had no will to bury kin, my heart's blood drained with theirs into the earth.
As though struck mad beneath the burning sun, I sat upon the mound, and when night set moved on to ruined stairs I'd never seen.
They rose up to a crumbling parapet and I stood nowhere, on that starry ledge -- beneath my foot, a small stone amulet.
The stone grew warm and seemed to hum a pledge of holy cities: hard to understand from whence came such a dream of pilgrimage.
A vision rose before me. I saw grand arches tiled with birds, a glistening portal of creatures gone to sea that once loved land.
I knelt and sipped from that dream courtyard pool, sleeping at last as though I had drunk wine, while buzzards wheeled above me in a circle.
The gatekeeper believed they were a scry to nurse me back to health; his wife was kind. They sold me, when recovered, to a scribe
so I could read to him as he went blind, while watching at the royal library, where no one ever came. I didn't mind.
I was thirteen. I learned the seventy first languages heard in the Babel tower and cures for which the ills had passed away.
At last, the old man died. It was my hour to serve the sacred books. I found Truth's name -- a passion more acute than love of power.
Then, traveling as if on wings, there came four holy letters quicker than light or space, remembered as if wrapped in bluish flame.
The Name anoints and scatters without trace. To it I will return when I have died, waxing and waning on time's silver tide. -- Judith Werner
THE CITY OF ENOCH
"And Cain knew his wife, who conceived and gave birth to Enoch. And he [Cain] built a city, and he named the city after his son, Enoch." (Genesis 4:17)
Each night above the wheat fields on the plain, The amber lights of Enoch's city blazed, And woke exhausted, beaten serfs who gazed As distant topaz glittered on their grain. And come the dawn, in temples built by Cain, Proud priests enrobed in jeweled vestments praised The gods that blessed their city and had raised Their merchant‑kings on high, to rule and reign.
Yet all their gold was stolen from the poor Who in back-alleys starved and cried for crumbs, While in rank gutters trickled beggars-blood. But now behold the city's courts of law, Mansions, markets, theaters, coliseums -- All buried under waves of Noah's flood. --Yakov Azriel
AFTER THE QUAKE
Treading carefully, down we go, a picture frame, a president, Kennedy, saints and sinners, worry beads, a pile of rubble where the earth recedes, objects scattered about this abscess, we come
a president, Kennedy, saints and sinners, worry beads play out their archeological stories, recommends objects scattered about this abscess, we come to gather up what's left, that we might spread . . .
play out their archeological stories, recommend the wisdom of what happened, off to send to gather up what's left that we might spread the lore, their vital statistics, all about them,
play out their archeological stories, recommend, a pile of rubble where the earth recedes, the lore, their vital statistics, all about them treading carefully, down we go, a picture frame. -- Zev Davis
THE LIGHT OF DAY
In a lodging house long antiquated, Where I dwelt for some tumbledown years, The fixtures were quaint and outdated; The wainscoting, archways, and piers Old-fashioned and still decorated With fretwork and glass chandeliers.
In the resident parlor one morning, A magical sunbeam burst through The crystalline prisms adorning A fanlight that colored the view; And the world came alive without warning With glints opalescent in hue.
With shimmers of bright efflorescence, Revealing the light of the sky In veils of divine iridescence, Which brought for a moment nearby A hint of the mystic quintessence Sublime in the powers on high. -- Jack Lovejoy
HERO HOME
Grey day awaiting brown man in green Woman standing beside yellow cab, A proud confident look in her eye Recalling a Silver Star clipping Commending his saving some buddies, Extolling the American way Of brotherhood fighting together. Hero Home.
Window droplets, kaleidoscope view, Usher the way to the neighborhood Where boards and posters mark the old path To the sixth floor where they shared it all, Before the Man took him away From top‑heavy table on holey floor, Community toilet and kitchen. Hero Home. -- Stephen Keller
THE WATER DREAMS OF A MODERN-DAY NOAH
Noah doesn't dream about beans & tall wheat reaching for wind & sun. Not anymore.
When he's not busy collecting wood, he stands on a corner, cup of change at his feet.
He holds a gopher wood sign, sometimes warning about dying & doom, sometimes he asks for help to build his pet project on the abandoned downtown lot.
Nobody stops. No one listens.
Every Sabbath, he stands the required distance from the synagogue, shouts until his throat burns for water:
learn what is drowning between your mouth & God's ear, feel holy when the ark opens, know the history of suffering, when it will suffice, learn to chant like the sea breaking against rocky shores, know all about absence, that the dream means more than marrying a nice Jewish doctor.
For his final sermon, he finds a bullhorn, forgets his usual rant about rain, speaks his own modern commandment to listen to our water dreams, that they're loose shutters swinging outside a window, open ajar, an echo of the breath before birds fly. -- ME Silverman
THE WORDS THEY SHOUT
The words they shout are boldly printed down within a thousand hues and pages spooled from daily scripts to gloss of fashioned gown each written phrase is hemmed and finely tooled.
And shows reblare their call to waiting ear of nature harmed and victims hurt by greed now dually wept in every flowing tear in how to feel for families left in need.
But countless rants just fill a grander cause to praise the voice above the aching child as forest bleeds and growing hunger gnaw the loud elite have righteous anger riled.
Yet actions speak without the death of trees and helping hands can soothe the voiceless pleas. -- Douglas Stockwell
AT A RED LIGHT
At a red light where I idled, stopped, a tap on the window, luckily rolled up, a tap like a battering ram, a sudden blur like lion in the eye of an antelope!
It was a wretch not waving evening news-- papers for sale, as happens at this corner where the magician guy makes change before the red light changes. He was waving roses,
it wasn't easy to see were red in the dark. It was Valentine's Day at night, for love, and he was hawking roses, was stuck with roses! The desperate bearer under a burden of
symbols of affection waited under the ticking of the light from red to go, when red would again be lost in an awful pulse of offer and be refused ha-ha repulsed.
Ferociously polite, he practically stood begging holding roses in tin cup, trying to buy some warmth for his apartment, paying for heat and rent, not eaten up
by boredom of the world towards the cold in which he lived, I figured, so unloved he needed merely a smile of change out-doled to keep the fiction that he felt approved,
and if you didn't buy (I bought) a flower, it would hurt him, he was so unsure. There went I but for the grace of Love reminding me remember: help the poor. -- John Milbury-Steen
ELLIOTT'S BAGS
Dressed in black he seems from several blocks away to teeter down the still, dark streets stretching to dawn, balances large shopping bags in blood‑drained hands, weighted like a scale -- bags stuffed with plastic tubs, challot and wine to lift the poor -- this master of restoring hope. -- Steven Sher
THE POLITICS OF PRETTY
Mind you, I wouldn't be caught dead in pink, and cute is a four-letter word, yet sometimes prettiness croons to me, about as energetic as a coconut cake, but as irresistible too.
Portzamparc's crystalline skyscraper makes glass cutting edge again: Its angles play alto saxophone. Aalto's buildings embrace but never, heaven forbid, cuddle. Renzo Piano sure doesn't suffer prettiness gladly. And Tange -- but OK, having established my credentials, I'll get to the point: I like Lutyens too. He coats his buildings in the sepia of memory, he serves hot chocolate and oatmeal cookies to edgy questions, while his buildings spontaneously generate sheepdogs who flop in front of them. A cottage industry of nostalgia.
Twachtman, plump with prettiness for most of his career, once, just once, went magically matte, after drinking enough sake to sober himself. But while I'm into this confessional mode, I'll even tell you I love PreRaphaelite paintings. Dante created a whole new circle for people who turn chiaroscuro into Technicolor. And yet -- skip the balsamic vinegar, pass me the Rossetti instead. -- Heather Dubrow
NEW YOUNG CAREERIST
You've been here before. You go undercover now below surface while others rise, ride over for their spotlight at the top of the wheel. Now she strives
to please patrons, co-workers, bosses, in ceaseless over-thinking (something you've lost, thank seasons). But passing her on the clock there's the same blind tears
same inner focus melting in vigilant self-judgment, hopes hitting against what is stealing the perception of others that seldom can be changed from the under side.
I would embrace her, but that would not be my place in this world of jurists. She must fight her own struggle. I go undercover. Wait an hour, touch a hand to her straight shoulder
offer a smile and tea. She hasn't left off crying at her desk softly pulling together, her stats, her status, the fight, no flight. Something you would've pondered alone
in the stall of a corporate bathroom. There's nothing you can do. Take tea with me? Yes! and sitting more erect she fishes out the strongest and the blackest. --Marilyn E. Johnston
"GO UNDER, LOVELY SUN"
Go under, lovely sun, they thought Very little of you, they knew you, holy one, not, For without toil and silently you rose Over a people for ever toiling.
You rise and set friendily for me, O Light! And well my eyes perceive you, glorious one! For godlike, silent reverence learned I When Diotima healed my feeling.
O Thou, Heaven's herald! how I listened to thee! To thee, Diotima! beloved! how these eyes Looked up, shining and thanking, From thee to the golden day. Then purled
More livingly the brooks, the dark earth's blossoms Breathed lovingly on me, And smiling over silver clouds Aether bowed down bestowing his blessing. -- Friedrich Hölderlin Translated from the German by Robert Glen Deamer
REVISITING THE RUINS
Like Gibbon threading through the ruins of Rome, Dumas on some Sicilian mountainside, Like Byron on a sunlit isle of Greece, I wander through a dry and dusty place And think what was, and then what might have been. -- Leonard H. Roller
__________________
VII. Accelerating
PALPITATIONS
The same erratic pounding means I am my mother's son: same chugging chest, same straining squeezebox tightly wound.
This devoted heart constructs a world of urgency -- a constant mother, my motor and my mooring --
the while plodding on from thump to thump, emphatic flap to flop and rest, and echoes her footsteps' return. -- Steven Sher
THE LIVING CENTER
The attendant buzzes us in (never have we had such a welcome), twenty wheelchairs wait patiently for us to open the door wide enough and long enough to manage an escape outside "The Living Center."
They find each moment longer than their drawn-out lives-hours and weeks and months and years and ages now stranded on islands of e ndless days. An old, old woman lifts her hand as we pass by, and when you clasp it
(you a stranger), her smile embraces you, the room around her loses its homesick smell. Who does she think you are? Like Jacob wrestling with the angel at Peniel, she will not let you go, until you kiss her, and then she sinks
Into the comfort of a lost remembered Love. -- Charlotte F. Otten
Walk on Down the Hall: A Meditation on The End
~Inspired by a Kabbalist, meditative practice. Dedicated to la familia Farji y mi Mama.
1. like a frog on a lily pad, sitting contemplatively ("dreaming back thru life, Your time – and mine accelerating") 2. oh, cruel and causeless life (yitgal v’yidka ––they were not ready) 3. the birds’ chirpchirpchirp > the mechanical whirring of the pool-pump motor 4. rooftops like that at 34th st stir up sweet memories (when they were here) 5. did they hear Black running after them? (quickly catching up as always) 6. the constant whirwhirwhir soothes me, but the orange/yellow sounds of the sun's rays interrupts these thoughts 7. and also, the sun's yellow/orange rays exhilarate me (faintly whispered, "you breath in the Nile") 8. ¡rumination energizes and intensifies everything again! 9. bend + sit = easy (ultimately, he1 couldn’t bear it and he2 was spritely…but then he jumped) 10. he1 catapulted me into the air ::splash:: (playing The Little Mermaid) 11. in my heart, i know that one day – chus v’chalila, pe pe pe – we'll all be with he1 andhe2 12. shema Israel, HaShem Elokeynu, HaShem echad ("strange now to think of you, gone") 13. it plays with my hair and dries the tears off my cheeks ("work of the Merciful Lord of Poetry") 14. the awesome Blue soars – expansive, boundless (there they are) 15. to their female soulmates, a meditation on the End (chirp chirpchirp chirp chirpchirp chirp (it's them)) -- Sasha Tamar Strelitz
[UNTITLED]
I contract into my 4 cubits and expand with each day. From the aperture in my ark the world appears more tranquil than before. I've gotten used to moving less, breathing less. This is my life for the time being, aureoled with a film of resignation. One can see a lot with closed eyes: it would take innumerable nights to describe the abundance. Human voices from other nights still echo here – they grow fainter, as I do. -- Ruth Blumert translated from the Hebrew by E. Kam-Ron
THE LAST SIGHT
What is the last fading image on your retina glaring light flicked away by the haughty surgeon the overall dark heaved into final suppression a mad truck roaring down on your soft vulnerable flesh sparks flying off the water like liberated demons grasping for your sight the weighty sky submerging into the green heaving sea the blank-faced soldier rushing at you with gargantuan bayonet fearing his own demise made a victim of your honed weapon the unswerving bullet heading for your nose child staring up at you in wonder terrorist's bomb exploding in your face a red-hot blanket flung over you and your world the passing parade of lost moments the montage of long-lost lover faces your tear-begrimed eyes your sweet goodbye kiss your sad wondrous eyes. -- Gerald Zipper
THAT MAY MY MOTHER LIT A CANDLE FOR HER MOTHER
I knew it would be one of the last times, that the extras she bought to leave in my house would be too soon for her but never if she thought it. Often at my house in May for her birthday or Mother's Day, my uncle called to remind her of the date, as if she would not know. Shadows of the light flicker in the laundry room where nothing could catch, blackening parts of the room like the graphite darkening names in her address book she already had a good start on -- Lyn Lifshin
GOOD NIGHT
He wants to remember the same place rows of vases with tulips a walled in keyboard with a musical score unattended, unfinished letters on the desk, a flask without wine, yet everything is soulless with only a few regrets for the silent past to connect the puzzles on the gaming table, you dream of warmth the sea and sunlight walking with your partner with the shadowed face not knowing what mortal expects to be here without a watch in the last hours now absent. -- B.Z. Niditch
EMPTIED DRAWERS
Emptied drawers scratch closed hunger for folded clothes Now smoothed into boxes labeled Taped Stacked The bottom row groans as the room fills.
Sounds echo as I snatch at his old shirts The ones that should have been given away I race to get them to the thrift shop Before the Heirs stomp into the house Their hunger and thirst clamor for attention.
I crave some extra time Some space in my mind The courage to grab a decision To jump up on the ramparts And defend our future From the threatening past Their desire to include every scrap Everything he once touched or wore -- a shrine -- the whole house could convert if I let them. -- Mindy Aber Barad
THE KNOWN
The cupboards Aligned in perfect order Your measurements On target Stacked dishes Behind the oak colored mask Built by hands Calloused in fear
I can feel the explanations On my skin The same skin you bruised In the name of discipline In the name of all you knew -- Cathy Porter
A CURSE, AND AN ASTONISHMENT Jeremiah
I translated my parents' Yiddish biblically -- God doesn't strike us with two rods -- though sticks is more precise.
God's wrath softened by Talmudic solace, e.g. I was myopic, but I had good hair.
That seemed fair, I thought, in the way adolescents think, though I already knew their siblings in Europe had been turned to ash.
After I learn about the things growing wild in my husband's body, I wait for the good news.
Will it be benign gratitude, each day made holy by the sun's rising?
Will I set aside distraction, turn like a sunflower only in his direction?
If there's a scale, a thousand poems of mine won't outweigh the theft of time.
Still, I will stand on it, because there's no other place to stand,
and I will stack up on the other side small stones of syllables, shards of our days. -- Florence Weinberger
ADVISED
Speak to God, the rabbi suggests. Spend some time every day speaking to God. Tell God everything. Cheaper than analysis.
I thought God already knew everything. The rabbi must have something else in mind, maybe guidelines to inner trials and sentencing when I'm smitten with remorse.
I've written hard-bitten poems about my father. I called my mother when she least expected it, as if her sanity was my enemy; I forget who taught me how to throw down spikes on the way to forbearance.
Then there's the matter of figuring out if forgiveness annuls the past or anneals it. And what good would it do, they've passed. This is how I distract myself, instead of engaging my heart's marrow, day by day, like the rabbi said. -- Florence Weinberger
JUST BEFORE DUSK
Just before dusk, a light supremely ardent, festive, yet sad, discharges beauty upon iridescent feathers, as the vast body of a wild tom turkey, its black beard dangling, floats above the slow, stately rhythm of its step and gradually dissolves into the under- brush. How, with words, to hold a covenant with this world in its brevity, where the radiant and incongruous combine, then vanish into darkness? What to make of this short and narrow season, so fervent in it embrace, so frail in its lasting? Brittle beauty, grant me one more hour. – Constance Rowell Mastores
IN NEW BEDFORD
Young ones dawdle, while the old folks rush from town to crowd the hearth. Aunt Ida rests alone, slouched in her chair, reviewing family funerals. A wearied matriarch, decades in this house she'd ladled soup, darned socks, and sat for pictures, new babies nestled in her lap each year -- . grandchild after child and just this year the first great-grandchild cradles in the town where she was born. It is a puzzling picture, this seasoned wife becoming widow, alone among her closest kin. Her sturdy house feels warped today, unhinged by Uncle's funeral.
Aunt Ida saw to grievous duties -- the funeral home, a shovelful of dirt, the year of Kaddish prayer -- all rituals in the house of mourning for Uncle, beloved judge in town. We knew the story -- how orphaned and alone, he’d worked his way through law school, always picturing
himself in chambers. Indeed he looked the picture of success mere weeks before his funeral: a final portrait in which he stands alone in stately robes next to his bench, the year of his appointment on the wall, and town hall seen through courtroom windows. He kept his house
and books arranged in order, and hoped the house of God was set for him. Though not a picture of well-being, his wife gives solace to townspeople come to pay respect, but the funeral defeats Aunt Ida. Her well known grit, year in, year out, falters from being alone
without the Judge. There is no peace alone for her, no place as mistress of the house. She foresees despair her consort in the years ahead – an unfamiliar family picture -- and her step is heavy, slow, funereal. She feels a burden, even to the town.
Aunt Ida dreams alone, a woeful picture. Her house is now the family’s, and her funeral This coming year will not surprise the town. -- Virginia Wyler
from UNFORSAKEN for my mother a"h
Slowly disappearing you sit before me. Each day I call out "come back" to more of you.
*
Shall I ever forgive the spring for coming late this year, when she who loved it could not wait?
*
We came into this world for love, for company, and perhaps for these partings most of all.
*
If you've gone to the world that is yours, the work of your hands -- surely it is a world of light.
*
This is the eleventh Prelude. It says how very sweet this life is and how brief. -- E. Kam-Ron
L41
Holding on to the others this hillside knows what it is to live alone all these years falling off-center
though you no longer follow still back away till your hands and the dirt once it's empty
both weigh the same -- a small stone can even things out the way this casket on each end
leans toward shoreline, smells from a sky unable to take root or balance the Earth, half
with no one to talk to, half just by moving closer -- what you trim floats off as that embrace all stone
is born with, covered till nothing moves inside except the lowering that drains forever. -- Simon Perchik
THE LOST ONES
On the hillside of stones those who live below ask only for light.
Their unseen voices lift from earth, from our innermost terrain, little echoes that have lived in us and become us over and over.
And we the surface treaders, we walk among them offering our frail words as though these might become that answering light.
And we know we have failed them, those whose seed became us that we might walk in light even among shadow.
So that standing here we fall dumb having only hands with which to touch these stones that own
us, that become the voice of what is to be to the end of our lives. -- Doug Bolling
HAKKAFOT a birthday poem for Rabbi Dr. Zvi Faier zts"l
There go the dancers, round and round and round, One holding in his arms, with strength of joy, The scroll on which his thread of life is wound, Another hoists a little girl or boy Onto his shoulder, who will doubtless hold Among their earliest memories this ride Through many turns, until they grow as old As the bent man who trudges by their side. I think of you, who now have left the dance, Whose voice no longer swells the Torah's song, Yet who are present in the furtherance Of that which fired your mind and kept you strong And holds you now within that day which gives An everlasting birth to all that lives. -- E. Kam-Ron
_________________
VIII. Meanings that Matter
DAVID STOPS TO REGARD A RAINBOW ON HIS WAY TO TEACH A CLASS
in grammar, syntax, usage, style: what's required, what must be done to shape our language into sentences (perhaps of an essay, perhaps of a poem) eloquent and elegant to carry meaning that matters through blue sky after a storm has torn the heavens and we need our most sacred watchful eye. -- Katharyn Howd Machan
STUMPS
We become despoiled. Sometimes Not even a word remains, Becoming a trap in snow Where the whole wilderness rhymes With nothing and coldness reigns In a world buried in woe.
But a word's a funny thing. Like a blackened stump's green shoots Adorning its wooded grave, Our longing sprouts every spring, For the Earth retains the roots Of the meaning we still crave.
Forests we worshiped once: Now take your well-earned rest Under this quilt of words. Your marvelous jeweled crowns Honored the tongues of the blessed Who now sound just like birds. -- Lionel Willis
CAVATATION
A descent into the cave Of the poem, Or when it has been written at a place With momentary slippage, A place associated with the sense Of a person beside himself, Or of people aside themselves, To one availing of only half of his own diction, And the other half after the fact. -- Lee Goldstein
PETRARCH CONSIDERS THE GIFT OF A FRIEND:
This is a map, of a kind, of England. Castles stud the fields, the battlements prettily etched, the chases and parks marked by lines of bushy trees, with drawings of hart and bristling boar— but it does not tell you which way is north. It would be useful to know where the bridges are, the distances between them. It would be useful to know how far you are from the sea.
But then, England, I am told, is always remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in dead ground. So perhaps this map is only meant as a poetic approximation. Then why is there no Avalon, no inked figure of King Arthur. No sword in the stone.
Then what does endure? Shall my unsent letters to Cicero endure? I find them more amusing than my sonnets. Or the unsent letters I wrote to Homer? Who possibly never even existed. Will this map I am now considering still be in use in 1374?
Yet for all its vagueness, I like this map. The way it dreams off the mind, the way the landscapes regroup themselves while I sleep, and even the histories that trail me -- the faces of the dead fading into other faces -- Gilgamesh, Hector, Roland... The storm has softened, the visor of war lifted.
In the quiet of my study, I begin work on yet another beautifully useless poem. Between one dip of the pen and the next, time passes. -- Constance Rowell Mastores
LUNCH
Grilled cheese sandwich Slice of pickle At the hospital with a Poor Clare poet-nun Spoke of saints and other poets And how compelling their intensity
Noted that each was like a poem (and a simple poem) I interjected.
She turned her head and gazed at me
Because here (I answered) no poem or person And she said
You are wrong About poems And this place She had forgotten ... that I was a psychiatristPerhaps you may some day become intense Remain that way for longer than it takes to sketch a lyric poem Remain Remain intense without relief
What a poet you might then become -- Jerry Hauser
THE DOVE
"Even while you sleep among the campfires, the wings of my dove are sheathed with silver, its pinions with shining gold," Psalm 68:13
Once I was lost, a dove in foreign lands of olives from black earth, dates from red sands. The desert sun that singed my plumes to night flamed within my heart in secret light.
You caught me, put a black dove in your cage, imprisoned love that knew no time or age. I navigated floods behind the bars, an eon's journey in a glimpse of stars.
I flew so far within, at such a height, my raven cloak of mourning molted white. Once I was blind, and now I've found release, to nestle winged freedom in your peace.
Once I was Noah's raven in a land where ornamental gods of stone still stand. Now I'm a white dove, winging back through space, surrendering my olive branch of grace. -- Judith Werner
FOLIO
All the myths I came to know, Nor Dad Did even care, Bestow themselves To poetry -- His Science unaware; All the math My father knew Nor ever Did I learn, Reviews Itself each Numbered page Of poetry I turn. -- David Kiphen
TO A FRIEND WHO THINKS HIS WORK HAS COME TO NOTHING
All the tragedies we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy, the passage of time. -- Simone Weil
You say you now make verse who aimed at art? Verse is not easy. You spent your youth in hard pursuit of its subtle knowledge, while others said to forget the dead and embrace the newest fashion. Yet, facing disillusion, you counteracted in exclusions, considering in meter and rhyme the one and only tragedy: the passage of time.
Do not desert good sense and skill, though others prefer the ambitious boys whose big lines swell with spiritual noise or flaunt a presumptuous innocence. Fierce impersonal forms have moved your pen; and, at times, a wise indifference. -- Constance Rowell Mastores
TWINKLETOES HAYIM
drunk from the plenty cup prodigious profligate poet producer wizard moonstruck sun dazzled word player followed his bouncing ball umpteen ways imaginatively copulated word startups breeding couplets koans free forms pranced pondered prodded pricked polished sighed sounded soared leapt heavenward juggled gurgling throbbing skilled ambitious side-stepping quickstepping jitterbugging waltzing freely floating running racing fast as thought can reach versifying essaying inspired plucky, perhaps in parts puerile, pretentious in the not pejorative positive striving sense, aspirational, neither perfect nor not perfect. polished, breathing in words exhaling poetic prayers exaltant exuberant assiduously attentive to his life's purposeful self imposition ambitious transforming essays to poetic prayer forms conjuring torrents of penned paper craft floating flotillas of spaceships shimmering rainbow hued strident or pastel subtle honey toned honed voluptuous extravagant or shrunken word-wise waste not precise poetics sounding shells horns trumpets tinkling stalagtitic drippings soaring sinking erupting energy radiant against inertia frothy flotsom algoid wavering or sediment solid Hay'im jests in earnest gestes, tinkers words dances His words inspired inspiring facing eternity's absolute inhuman silence -- Judith Issroff DUN ARANN Aran Islands Poetry Festival 1999 Two thousand years of stone and stone
and stone: atop an ancient island, clouds of bone above deep flowered grass, in Celtic sky. We listen to the poets share their words in Irish, English, English, Irish, lines as intricate as thunder warning birds that freest flight is more than wings
from vines. us into separate truths beside the face of justice, even though new poems are born. And yet, hope makes a marriage in
this day: – Katharyn Howd Machan
CIRCLE DANCE
Circles dance under grapevines in the breeze, dancers in white garments, borrowed robes, singing rondeaux under grapevines, dancing to drum beats with the song of birds.
Circles dance up the hills, up to Jerusalem, up to the Mountain of Myrrh, through the seven gates, down the narrow alleys, along the tunneled ways, holding hands, for in their dance they are complete.
And on the Mountain of Myrrh Forgiveness and Truth hold hands with Peace and with joy they dance in the center of the circle dance. -- Ruth Fogelman
Let’s dance to celebrate life in infinite circles of kindness. Our hearts keep the beat to the swing of joy.
Bracelets swirl on smiling acquaintances. Dancers hold and turn sharing love in tune. -- Hayim Abramson
|
||
|
To return to The Deronda Review homepage, click here. |
