by Herbert Munshine (Great Neck, NY)
It rained that day. The gray sky
matched everybody’s mood
and as my face was pelted
with large, heavy drops that hurt,
I reassured myself that I would never cry.
I was almost 10.
I stood lost in the crowd. I didn’t
have a need to be up front
but someone nudged me,
pushed me closer to the grave
and I looked down and saw
the plain pale brown coffin
decorated with a matching
Jewish star, the place in which
my mother slept (that was the current
euphemism), and I was numb.
An old man speaking through
his beard, dressed in a long black coat,
a rabbi whom I’d seen in my rare visits
to Temple Emanuel in Parkchester when
certain holidays occurred, said words
I didn’t understand, made noises
that offered a young child no comfort,
and sporadically others, most of which
I didn’t recognize because my family had chosen
isolation as a way of life. He mumbled what I guessed
were prayers, and all I felt was the heavy rain that
seemed determined to replace the tears that wouldn’t come.
I paid attention to my heavy breathing
because, I guess, it took my mind away
from that pine coffin that held what was left
of the woman who used to comfort and care for me
when I was sick, who used to cook for me in her
Jewish-Latvian way, from scratch to tasty,
with the constantly secret sacred ingredient
being love.
I had been her companion as she prepared the food,
the one who licked the bowl … but what exactly
was my role now that she was gone? Who would be
my mother? A little child needed a mother, but she was gone.
These thoughts bombarded my defenselessness
while wise men said their Hebrew words and still
the tears refused to visit me, and the rain kept falling
and the shovels lifted senseless dirt and dropped it
on my mother and I felt like screaming and running
to her but she was no longer there for me. Instead,
the sounds replaced her voice, those holy sounds
that meant nothing to a ten-year-old,
a boy who simply wanted to hear
his mother’s voice again.
Herbert Munshine grew up in the Bronx and graduated from C.C.N.Y. with both a B.S. in Education and a Master’s Degree in English. You can find his baseball poetry on Baseball Bard where he has had more than 100 poems published, and where he was recently inducted into that site’s Hall of Fame. He lives with his wife in Great Neck, NY.
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