Poetica Magazine
Poetica Magazine
Leave a Comment
I’m Preparing My Body for Your Birth
the way the Hevra Kadisha prepares
the dead for burial. I cut
my nails: thumb pinky middle-
finger pointer ring-
finger. I squeeze
my wedding band off that swollen
stump. I anoint my massive
belly with lilac oil and watch the ghost
of your fist move across me
a purple current
in that vast ocean I contain. Do the dead flutter
so, too? I squat
to stretch my pelvis, as narrow
as the ancient gates
of the Old City
of Jerusalem, cool and wet, pilgrims
and peddlers coming going
squeezing past
each other and the unseen
spirits,
whose bodies, scrubbed and wrapped
in white as mine is now, the towel barely
stretching round,
are lowered down
as they rise up--up--
I’m preparing my body to bear
down so you may rise, your
cry as wild and haunting
as a Shofar’s
so that the walls
that separate you from me
the living from the dead
the holy from the profane
come crashing
crashing down.
Visiting the Iniquity Upon the Children,
Unto the Third and Fourth Generation of Them
(in memory of Anita Silverman)
by Maya Bernstein
When he was a boy, my husband told me,
he devoured pears: skin, flesh, core, seeds.
But not the stems, which he brought to his mother
(whose leg was left mangled by polio in a DP camp
in Vienna, 1949) as a gift. He believed they delighted her.
But it was he who delighted her, her hungry son.
I think I hear her coming now!
She was two when they left Debrecen by foot
on Passover night. Her mother drugged her
so she wouldn’t ask the Four Questions. Her mother
who had survived with Christian papers in a Beauty Parlor
in Budapest, cutting the German soldiers’ beards, dancing
with the German soldiers’ groping hands, clopping feet.
They assumed her cheeks were wet with pleasure
but her tears were for Tokaj, for yellow muscats, for her mother
I think I hear her coming now!
rotten on the vine. A boy, he didn’t understand.
But knew enough to try to make his mother glad.
He offered her his stems and she held out her hand,
again, again, wove stem with stem until they were the length
of her lame leg. She leaned on that wobbly cane. She kept
taking step after step after step.
I think I hear her coming now!