Town of Ghosts, and: Our Exalted Guests, and: Gad
Rent from DeepDyve- Town of Ghosts, and: Our Exalted Guests, and: Gad
Town of Ghosts
for Aharon Appelfeld
The Rebbe's home has become a dairy,The synagogue a place where people shoot pool.
Mountains overlook the village's mass grave,The dead haunt the dreams of peasant women.
Aunts and uncles slip by like shadows.In a town of ghosts, strange things happen.
Hasidim, Yiddishists, Zionists, Assimilationists —The cart of death carried them all to the grave.
For days you walked through the roads of deep mudWarming your feet in the lining of father's coat.
Your mother's pendant shines on an upholstered tray,Her jewels dance inside the villagers' houses.
You drink the black milk of childhoodReciting Kaddish for the dead and the living.
Our Exalted Guests
We enter the sukah and invite the ancient ushpizin.Our hearts are full like the harvest moon,A chair in one corner covered with white silk [End Page 123] For these exalted guests.
A vase of day lilies rests on the table.Overhead the sky is inky blue.We see the starsThrough the canopy of evergreen boughs.
We were dancers with lighted torches in our handsMusicians playing the lyre, trumpet, and cymbalsSinging songs and rejoicingIn the "water-drawing" from the pool of Shiloach.
Now we live in a less ecstatic timeOf human bombs and scorched earth.
Still we invite our exalted guests.Abraham brings with him loving-kindness,Isaac unshakable equilibriumAnd Jacob enters with the cloud of glory.
We were jugglersFlipping fire torches into the night airEverywhere the sound of waterAs clear and as bright as the stars.
Moses and Aaron, loyal shepherdsArrive to teach the blueprint of creation.
May our children grow like the fruits of JosephWho stands here tall and straight like the palm branch,Joseph, interpreter of dreams, of the crisscrossingOf actions and their consequences.
O David, father of the once great and fallen sukah,Play the notes of your harp in our dwelling!
Still we draw water from the wells of salvation
Gad
Gad is the intrepid fighter,The first into battleHe will pursue his foes. [End Page 124]
God shall be the trope of Israel,But Gad shall be the troop.His tribe consists of soldiers.
The dark green in your windowReminds us of the color of khakisWorn by the army today.None will be missing.They will return in safetyAlong the same path.
History is the truth that reveals the lie.In war after war,Gad's soldiers have not returned home.The war dead fill the cemeteriesIn Haifa and Safed, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.And the blood of Rabin still divides the land.
Steven P. Schneider is Professor of English and Director of New Programs and Special Projects in the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas Pan-American. With his wife Reefka, he created "Borderlines: Drawing Border Lives," a poetry-art exhibit of twenty-five drawings and twenty-five bi-lingual poems (English and Spanish) about life along the U.S. Mexico border. Their work is scheduled for book publication by Wings Press in 2010. His poem "Chanukah Lights Tonight" is featured on Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry website and was published in Kooser's nationally syndicated newspaper column. Schneider is the author of a collection of poems entitled Unexpected Guests (2008) and a critical study, A. R. Ammons and the Poetics of Widening Scope (1994), and editor of the essay collection Complexities of Motion: New Essays on A.R. Ammons's Long Poems (1999).
