Mizmor L'David Anthology
Slowly, through repetition,
an
earworm becomes lodged
in my neural pathways,
displacing
the prayers
I've been learning to say
belatedly. Walking
up
and down the three flights
of stairs in my home,
I
hear a small voice
reciting the beneficent
effects of
Trulicity.
Over time, more and
more of
the TV commercial
comes through, until I
become
anonymous
to myself, merely a vessel
through which the
gospel
of this good medicine
passes, purged
of its
ghastly side-effects,
which the voiceover
in the ad reels
off
quickly. What ever happened
to the morning prayer
I'd
just begun to get
into the habit of davening?
I loved how it ended
with
the phrase
rabbah
emunatekhah, Your faith-
fulness is great.
Not
my faith in God, but God's
faith in me is the act
of
mercy for which I
thanked him on awakening.
This nearness to
the
divinity
that sought me out
in my seventh decade
has
been supplanted
by the promise of healing
that Trulicity
offers.
Even as I gradually
feel the
loss of working
memory, I fail to think
that Trulicity can
hold
no meaning for me
because I don't have
type-2
diabetes. What
I do suffer from is
a sick soul, a
frustrated
yearning for God
Who sometimes takes me
by
surprise, a radiant
energy pours down
my spine and is gone
Who I call on
to sustain me,
the living
God, Adonai, Hashem
You return like
a distant
memory, or
a moment of peace
that effaces my desire
to
behold God's face, or
the end of these long nights
of exile
from sleep, or
like a beam of shining
darkness that
eclipses
the void I stumble through,
a kind of
homesickness
for the God my mother's
mother walked
with
every day in green pastures
as a child in Besarabia.