Kislev I

There is something of a bird in me

That wants to follow you south

When the time comes.

I just wish I knew when it was coming

So that I could get ready to peel myself off Jerusalem,

Finger by finger,

An eyelash here, a hair there.

I wish I knew when that was.

BDE

Your little blue car-

That’s what I remember.

That’s what defined my first year here.

Carsickness.

Driving through carpark barriers.

You accidentaly reversing into me.

They should take your licence away, but they don’t,

Because the little blue car is the shomer of orphans.

How sad it has to end.

Change

When you are a city kid,

Growing up in a meadow is hell.

Hell and a pocketful of daisies.

The recreation of ourselves in the transition from child to adult is a prolonged process of taking back the reins.

The city kid can finally fall asleep to the hum of traffic,

And jump on a tube each morning.

The freedom to evolve is heaven, on earth.

Once and for all

I thought the world, and everybody in it, owed me something.

Some undefinable thing.

It differed in every situation, altered in every context.

When I reached a clearing in the forest, a beautiful light place, where peace ruled and loved and forgave, I reached the realisation of the heaviness of my beliefs.

From where they came- built it as I began, or buttoned down as I grew- I do not know.

Being relieved of the expection of that debt to be fulfilled, being relieved of the endless wait and endless search for whatever it was that whomever I came across owed me-

Owed to me-

That was the truest freedom.

To this day, it is the biggest weight that has been lifted from my little survivor’s shoulders.

Rosh Chodesh Kislev

Kislev’s little kisses hit Jerusalem;

Two hundred at a time.

The muddy earth clings to each footstep

As though it were the last of the exiles

Coming home.

Remember the rains of every year you have lived here, and make peace with becoming

Clean and cold

And, heaven forbid,

Older,

Wiser,

Worn down,

Wintered in.

Six Years Later

There has been a terrible mistake

In the dark, green harbour of your soul;

Any ship that sailed to you now

Would sink in your depths.

You look like safety from afar

But truly,

You are the cautionary tale

For every Jewish girl

Who had a dream

And slept through the nightmare

In the 13th arrondissement.

You are dead now

Although you appear

To live,

Breathe,

Love,

Smile on occasion.

You are the ghost of someone who can never be revived,

Nor properly remembered.

Perhaps that is why

When life grew

You took two fingers

And clenched the wick

To bring back the comfortable darkness.

Two deaths, and not a single kaddish.

Kavanah

Seek G-k, truth,

Universal knowledge,

Verifiable narratives;

Record them.

Name them.

Remember them.

In all truths, is a single truth, that is G-d,

And it is our purpose to seek, to follow, to serve and to uplift, to separate, and to sanctify,

The divine from the indifferent,

The holy from the heedless.

Play to deaf ears, paint dreams for blind men.

Our inability to perform the simple task of the separation of things, is, in simple terms

The failure of a generation to perform humanity’s purpose.

Truth, clinging to its needy sibling, delusion.

Chessed, in the form of a lonely search for physical closeness with another body, without meaning, obligation or holy intention.

I have been happiest in my most unholy moments,

I have served the deprivations of my own soul.

What right do I have to insert myself biographically into a poem rebuking the weaknesses of my generations?

Why, none, responds the sardonic voice of History.

Zikharon

Guy Fawkes

A man with a bullet in his back cannot pray.

A woman with a wound in her head cannot write.

A soldier with one foot over the border cannot retreat.

Democracy cannot be ruled, merely governed.

Words without intent are merely decoration.

The point of writing is to inspire the removal of the bullet from the back of the man who wishes to pray.

She Said Yes

Whenever a shayna maydel feels wretched, terrible

About her spinsterhood-

About her inability to dutifully

Marry herself off

At the appropriate time and the appropriate place,

To the chosen chosson;

One doesn’t just stand around.

One takes her gently by the hand

And sits with her through the five hour footage

Of the funeral of the Late Great

Princess of Wales

Diana Spencer;

And one asks the unmarried wretch

Whether she oughtn’t to be grateful

To be alive and single,

Rather than being dragged, dead and heaving,

Down the mall

By the horsemen of one’s mother-in-law.

One ought to be grateful, really.