Category Archives: poetry

October 30, 2017 · 8:55 am

Rosh Hashana, 5778

by Richard Epstein (Washington, DC)

It’s Indian Summer.  My Thai wife
brought home matzah ball soup
for the evening meal.  In the morning,
I woke to the aroma of matzah brie
on the kitchen stove.

She knows, with strawberry jam,  I will
eat all she can make.  As I type this,
I hear an interview with Warren Buffett
somewhere in the background.

This year, I have ignored Rosh Hashanah.
At least, I thought I did, until now.
But like Warren Buffett, Rosh Hashana
plays somewhere in the background.

I hear a ram’s horn call out its warning:
Wake up!  Prepare! To clear my thoughts
I went for a walk in the woods along Sligo Creek.

I saw a young man dressed in black standing
in the middle of a narrow footbridge reading
from a prayer book.  As I passed, he dropped
a handful of bread crumbs into the stream.

Long ago, a holy man dressed in white
would lead a goat into the desert to freedom.
A ritual or cure?  But, like wiping chalk writing
from a blackboard, a residue remains.

For Rosh Hashana, I was taught to examine
past actions and deeds. Define the behaviors
that be best cast off and those to save.

With defiance, pye weed, goldenrod and asters
shout a last hurrah. The tall grasses bow
to the shortening of days and impending cold.

Like Indian summer, I prepare myself for change
in this grand parade.  I reflect back, then forward
to another year.

Richard Epstein lives in the Washington DC area and is active in the Warrior Poets sponsored by Walter Reed Medical Center, the Veterans Writing Project and he hosts an open mic venue for veterans and friends of veterans on the National Mall.

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October 23, 2017 · 8:29 am

A Full Tank of Gas

by Milton P. Ehrlich (Leonia, NJ)

Father wept in ‘33
when smoke from book burning
wafted down Polack Alley in Maspeth.

He knew the line from Heine:

When they burn books,
they will ultimately burn people.
 

My family huddled in fear
as synagogues burned on Kristallnacht.
Newsreel Stormtroopers
rampaged through my childhood dreams.

When swastikas were painted
on the front door of our synagogue,
we were dismissed early from Hebrew School,
and, hurrying home I was waylaid
by snarling teenagers
who dragged me into Mt Olivet cemetery,
tied me to a tombstone and spray-painted
a swastika on the back of my coat.

My uncle survived a year at Dachau as a child.
As an adult, he never went to sleep
without a full tank of gas in his car,
like Shostakovich,
who slept with a packed suitcase
beneath his bed.

Milton P. Ehrlich, Ph.D., an 85-year-old psychologist, has published numerous poems in periodicals such as Descant, Wisconsin Review, Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow, Toronto Quarterly Review, Christian Science Monitor, Huffington Post, and The New York Times.

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October 9, 2017 · 10:07 am

Grandfather

by Milton P. Ehrlich (Leonia, NJ)

Grandfather did magic
with a tremulous sleight-of-hand.
Cards and coins vanished
before my surprised eyes.

He could do soft-shoe and tap dance
with a cane like a vaudevillian pro.
He loved to tell corny jokes that
he heard on Eddie Cantor’s radio show
and that never failed to amuse him.

We went to the Stanton Street Shul
on Saturday mornings. I tossed
small paper bags filled with peanuts
and raisins at bar mitzvah boys.

The scent of leather phylactery
straps permeated the premises
from the men who wrapped tefillin
on weekdays on arms, hands, and fingers,
as well as on the top of the head.

Afterwards, he shared snuff
with friends, who sipped wine
and relished schmaltz herring
on challah woven together
with strands representing
the unity of Israel’s tribes.

Sabbath lunch: borscht and pitcha,
followed by a chulent, baked overnight
on a coal kitchen stove.

Grandfather had only one request.
He wanted a photo of himself
dressed exactly like his father
in a photo taken years earlier.

When I was old enough to use
a Brownie Kodak box camera,
he got the picture he wanted,
just before he died.

Little did he know his great-grandson
would become a columnist for The Forward,
the only newspaper he ever read
while drinking Swee-touch-nee tea
in a glass with a cube of sugar.

He was just a man, loved, and not forgotten.
What will my grandchildren remember of me?

Milton P. Ehrlich, Ph.D., an 85-year-old psychologist, has published numerous poems in periodicals such as Descant, Wisconsin Review, Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow, Toronto Quarterly Review, Christian Science Monitor, Huffington Post, and The New York Times.

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October 2, 2017 · 8:48 am

“You Jewish?”

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

“You Jewish?”

At a crowded train hub

a man dressed in a long black robe

pointed at me and repeated, “You Jewish?”

“You, Jew, step out of the line.”

I waved him away.

“Men here, women over there.”

How dare he, out of all the people

rushing for their trains, single me out?

“Achtung, mach schnell.”

Do I have a long nose?

Do I have money pouring out of my pockets?

Do I shuffle along like a prisoner?

Please, God, don’t single me out.

The mournful music of the camps

resonates in my soul.

But then, later, after some thought,

I wondered if I had misread the Chasid.

Maybe he was just offering me

a sweet greeting for the holiday season.

I don’t want to be chosen.

Maybe he was simply saying

we are landsmen, no?

I dismissed him out of hand.

My parents are European.

I could have had numbers on my arm.

Have I been so scarred I may have missed

an opportunity for connection and grace?

You, Jewish? Yes, I am.

The author of twelve books for young adults, Mel Glenn has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years. Lately, he’s been writing poetry, and you can find his most recent poems in the YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy, edited by M. Jerry Weiss.

If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit: http://www.melglenn.com/

 

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September 25, 2017 · 6:25 am

Questions for My Mother

by Janet R. Kirchheimer (New York, NY)

What if
that afternoon instead of making love
in the sewing room you’d
cooked in the kitchen
perfecting what would become
your family’s famous zucchini bread recipe or
what if
you and Daddy had just talked?

What if
you decided that afternoon
to read a book instead,
and what was it
made you decide to make love
the second day of Rosh HaShanah
and that makes us toast my conception each year

with champagne? Would I
have turned out differently or would I
have received someone else’s fate if I
had been conceived at another moment?

Would the angel in charge of conception still have
placed the same drop of semen before the Holy One
and asked, Master of the universe what
is to happen to this drop?

Janet R. Kirchheimer is the author of How to Spot One of Us, poems about her family and the Holocaust.  Her recent work has appeared in The Poet’s Quest for God and is forthcoming in Forgotten Women.  Janet is currently producing AFTER, a cinematic film about Holocaust poetry.  https://www.facebook.com/AfterAPoetryFilm/

This poem is reprinted from Kalliope, where it first appeared, with the kind permission of the author.

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September 18, 2017 · 9:51 am

Semitic Semantics

by Gelia Dolcimascolo (Atlanta, GA)

On the day before Rosh Hashanah
I do nothing
to commemorate
the start of the New Year.

The Orthodox Jewish teenager
from across the cul-de-sac
greets me with her laptop, some papers,
and a question mark on her face.

We sit side-by-side in my dining room,
like two candles, backs to the cabinet
which holds my parents’ menorah
and the book I am reading, Unorthodox.

We work out rhyme schemes
for odes and ballads,
discuss the rhythm of heartbeats.
A smile replaces the question mark.

On Rosh Hashanah
I celebrate
by dancing
at the ballet studio.

That night my Episcopalian neighbor
joins us for dinner at our house.
With a wink of his eye, he says I’m not a Jew
simply because I don’t “practice the faith.”

We wrestle over that one.
My fists clench in faux anger;
I straighten him out,
defend my right to the tribe.

Gelia Dolcimascolo, an award-winning poet, is a writing tutor at Georgia State University Perimeter College. Her poems have been published in journals, anthologies, and books, including Heart by Heart: Mothers and Daughters Listening to Each Other; Through a Distant Lens; The Art of Music; and Haiku Pix Review. Her novella, Aurelia and the Library of the Soul, a nominee for the Georgia Author of the Year Award (GAYA), was published in 2016. Born in South Africa, she grew up in Queens, New York, and lived with her husband and daughter in California. She considers herself a “nostalgic” (secular) Jew and enjoys her cultural heritage at the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta. Her website is www.geliawrites.com

About her poem, “Semitic Semantics,” she writes that it “reflects my views as a non-religious Jew. I sometimes find myself defending my cultural heritage while isolated from mainstream Judaism – an existential dilemma. The poem takes place in Atlanta, roughly a decade ago.”

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August 14, 2017 · 9:16 am

Prayer, Anyone?

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

When the fate of the world
lies not in our own hands,
when chaos is loosed upon the land,
can the power of prayer
move mountains and men?

Can appeal to the heavens
restrain madmen from their fury?

Would that the weight of all prayers,
Jewish and otherwise,
tip the scales in favor of sanity.

When bombs rained down in WWII,
when people were herded into camps,
when others in charge carve our destinies,
when disasters, man-made or natural, strike now,
the only recourse in our own hands comes
when those hands clasp together in prayer.

I may be the paragon of doubt,
a stranger to formal ritual,
but when catastrophe throws its thunderbolt,
I am the first to utter, “Oh, my God!”
and proceed to direct my prayers skyward.

Do you not do the same?

The author of twelve books for young adults, Mel Glenn has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years. Lately, he’s been writing poetry, and you can find his most recent poems in the YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy, edited by M. Jerry Weiss.

If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit: http://www.melglenn.com/

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August 7, 2017 · 9:22 am

Forefathers

by Janet R. Kirchheimer (New York, NY)

I tell my father that I’m working on a new poem.
I got into the poem, but can’t seem to find a way out.
“Kind of like a fart in your pants,” he says.
And I realize that my poetic forefathers were probably not
William Shakespeare and Robert Frost, but more likely
Milton Berle and Henny Youngman.

I ask him if there were any poets in our family, and he tells me
Tante Channele was a poet but nobody liked her, which doesn’t
make me feel any better.

A hairy woodpecker, with the red mark of a male on its neck,
comes to our birdfeeder today.
“Look at how bright, how clean his colors are,” my father says.
“He looks like he’s just been painted.”
And I know exactly who my poetic forefather is.

Janet R. Kirchheimer is the author of How to Spot One of Us, poems about her family and the Holocaust.  Her recent work has appeared in The Poet’s Quest for God and is forthcoming in Forgotten Women.  Janet is currently producing AFTER, a cinematic film about Holocaust poetry.  https://www.facebook.com/AfterAPoetryFilm/

This poem is reprinted from Mima’amakim with the kind permission of the author.

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July 24, 2017 · 8:33 am

The Nature of Things

by Janet R. Kirchheimer (New York, NY)

I was eleven the spring my father singed his eyebrows off
while burning down pear trees.

Anne Carson says dirt is a minor thing.
This is not true.
Perhaps she has not seen a string bean pushing
its way up through the dirt.

The Rabbis say that Adam gave names to all the animals,
but do not say who named the trees.

These are some of the plant names I love:
Joseph’s coat, Persian shield, Silver shrub, African mallow.

Once in January, my father woke me at four o’clock in the morning
to help cover the parsley in our garden with blankets.
Frost was on the ground.
Stars, so bright at that time of the year, lit the garden.

In June, I call home to ask my father about the gladiolas.
He says some are coming, some are going.

The Talmud says occasionally rain falls because of the merit
of one man, the merit of one blade of grass, of one field.

Janet R. Kirchheimer is the author of How to Spot One of Us, poems about her family and the Holocaust.  Her recent work has appeared in The Poet’s Quest for God and is forthcoming in Forgotten Women.  Janet is currently producing AFTER, a cinematic film about Holocaust poetry.  https://www.facebook.com/AfterAPoetryFilm/

This poem is reprinted from Mima’amakim with the kind permission of the author.

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July 3, 2017 · 8:35 am

Pidyon Haben

by Gerard Sarnat (Portola Valley CA)

“Every first-born male among your children, you must redeem.”

— Exodus 13:13

Redemption’s a primitive mitzvah commanded in

the Old Testament to occur on my grandkid’s 30th day

when a Kohen from the priestly patrilineal tree of

Aaron is handed 5 silver shekels by the boy’s father.

While our alternating amused and distraught daughter

nurses off in a dark corner, ultra-orthodox little girls

clothed from head to toe wrap garlic + sugar cubes

in gold lamé lace bags that their subjugated mother

hangs for kenahorah-poo-poo-poo knock on wood

good luck to shoo away devils — after which she checks

that the fancy sheitel covers her wifely shaved skull.

Compared to the newborn’s bris with the mohel

hacking off the infant’s foreskin, this ain’t nothin’.

But having successfully bit my tongue, all said & done

till the next one, these rituals reinforce why I’m an atheist.

Gerard Sarnat has spent time as a physician and social justice protestor in jails,  built and staffed clinics for the marginalized, and spent decades working for Middle East peace. His work, which has appeared in over seventy magazines, including Gargoyle, Lowestoft Chronicle, and The American Journal of Poetry, has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

For more information about Gerard Sarnat, visit his website: GerardSarnat.com.

 

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