by Bill Siegel (Boston, MA)
You thought you were Black,
my cousin said,
talking about high school
when we thought we were
twin brother and sister,
and I guess I did,
just because I read Malcolm X
in a school almost pure-white
My parents thought
I’d be a rabbi
just because I kept studying Torah
after my bar mitzvah
And even though I stopped at 14
even after that, they thought I’d return
Three years later, while the car radio sang,
my mother cried
when I told her I thought
there was no God for me
Another three years, Yom Kippur,
home from college, a note by my bed
We’ve gone to services. Meet us there
if you think you still care.
And three years after that,
when I brought home my shiksa wife,
even then,
even now, when they think of me,
they think, he could have been a rabbi
******
Bill Siegel lives in the Boston MA area, and writes both prose and poetry – about family, fishing, jazz, and more. He has two manuscripts in process: “Printed Scraps”, poems inspired by Japanese woodblock prints; and “Waiting to Go Home”, about family and memories of growing up. His work has been published in “Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust” (Northwestern University Press), and “Indigenous Pop: Native American Music from Jazz to Hip Hop” (University of Arizona Press). His poems also appear in Blue Mesa Review, Rust+Moth, JerryJazzMusician, Brilliant Corners, and InMotion Magazine, among others.
The Jewish Writing Project 