Archive
11/22/08
History's Tears
This Saturday night, wandering in my solitude's wilderness, I hear the history of the years Whispering, mysteriously, in my tears — Tears of joy or fear or sorrow, I'm not sure which — Dripping from my eyes' Dead Seas, to my painfully parched lips.
The salt of my people burns my tongue, my gums. My throat tightens, knots up, chokes, As though roaming hoards, orchestrating a modern-day pogrom, Had garroted me, with their vicious race hatred — Vestiges of Lot's wife Sodomized, for her curiosity.
Oh, the bitter, bittersweet years, Arcing, back and forth, between famine and feast — Enslavement in Egypt and ephemeral freedom in Canaan, The Babylonian Diaspora and the founding of the State of Israel, Watched over by David Ben-Gurion, our age's Abraham.
This Shabbas, for whatever reason, Jewish history seems to have detected my presence, Implicated me, in its desperate unfolding, Identified my sad, tragic soul as a survivor of Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Haman, Torquemada, Hitler, Arafat,
My tears as tributaries conveying the essence of my heritage, Across deserts forty-five-hundred years wide, From Ur of the Chaldees to St. Louis, Missouri, Where, to endure, I turn those tears into oceans of poetry, To irrigate Zion's sands, nourish its dream to flourishing.
11/22/08
|
|||
|
|||
