Poetica Magazine Contemporary Jewish Writing

Marge Piercy has written 17 novels including The New York Times Bestseller Gone To Soldiers; the National Bestsellers Braided Lives and The Longings of Women; the classics Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She and It; and most recently Sex Wars. Among her 20 volumes of poetry the most recently published is On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light. Her critically acclaimed memoir is Sleeping with Cats. Born in center city Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan and Northwestern, the recipient of four honorary doctorates, she is active in antiwar, feminist and environmental causes.

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On Rosh Hashana it is inscribed

On Yom Kippur it is sealed…

At 85 how those works resonate.

Will I live to pray on another Yom

Kippur? Some by plague, it says

of the deaths coming this year.

A plague never was real to me

before now. Fire devours more

lives. I live in fear of it, while

drought kills frogs and trees.

Death has taken so many.

How can I not expect I may

be among them? I make what

amends I can. An isolated

solemnity weighs upon me all

this day without rabbi or cantor.

I speak sacred words into silence.

A Jew alone is incomplete.

Poetica Magazine