poem

Poem: The State of Things

On the day after Yom Kippur, I ride my bike along the waterfront. Pious men build their sukkah before sunset. Will they invite me to be their guest? Priests and prophets are oblivious of emptiness. The past is with me, an unhappy house in my old neighborhood in Buenos Aires. Across the river, platinum flickers. There is a difference between dream and vision. I want to describe the moon behind olive trees, sunflowers against a black sky. I want to keep the light that fills my bedroom with the memory of a vacation home. I want to fix what is broken before I can let it go. The rabbi said one embrace can heal the world. Cut off and childless, I want to know: What sin did I commit? Which mark did I miss? No one asks for forgiveness at the waterfront. Longshoremen dance in Amsterdam. The factory is gone. I hear laughter in...

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poem

Poem | Of All the Peoples by Nathan Alterman

When under the gallows our children cried We did not hear the world’s wrath. For of all the peoples you selected us For us you loved and sanctified. For you selected us of all the peoples hose of France, Japan and Norway. And when our children march to the gallows Smart Jewish kids, they all know That their blood does not count and say Mom, turn your eyes the other way. The iron devoured day and night And the holy Christian Father in the city of Rome Did not come out with the icons of Christ To stand one day in a pogrom. To stand one day, one single day Where for years like a lamb A small Unknown Jewish kid Stands alone. Great is the worry about sculptures and paintings Lest those art treasures are destroyed in a raid But the heads of infants, art treasures they are, Are smashed to the walls, and crushed on the...

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Poem // 3AM Nign

3AM Nign she sang as if looking through the magnifying glass lullaby’s every heave, a thesis on slowing down, peeling – each note, a pit assessing its fullness lullaby’s underside, hymn to darkness (sleep no longer a goal but a side-effect) of the dream’s reaffirmed primacy two silences on each side of her amplifying the song’s timing – family of three,  thickening liquid poured in and out of the bedroom’s cup Jake Marmer’s first poetry collection Jazz Talmud was published in 2012.

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