Poetry of

The Book Store                                                        

The Sabbath just ended, the winter town,

found anew, is a hopping place.  Come June 30th

New York City schools pour out scores and scores

of two-year-old boys toddling around and holding

their shoulders straight to balance their

black beanies on their thin hair coaxed to form

corkscrew curls around their ears.

                                                         This summer,

lumbers a Yiddish bookstore, not too far from

the growling prison.  My feet hop and skip

and grip an almost invisible pattern

on the stern sidewalk.  There’s a bookstore!

a Yiddish bookstore!  Is it going

to glow in the winter when only the prison

opens and shuts its doors?  My two friends and

I scan the isles of the Yiddish bookstore.

Almost bored, I spy a worn red velvet

binding.  I cannot pull away my hand

and then I glimpse in the margins of pages

colored images of the creation.

                                                     Carefully,

raising the images close to my eyes,

screams and crying make me put the book down

quickly.  The Yiddish friend lies on the floor,

his hands and legs flailing, his mouth twisted.

What’s happening?  A convulsion?   My other

friend holds up the headlines of a newspaper:

Five Jewish soldiers killed in Lebanon.”

His brother is an Israeli soldier in Lebanon.

                  She bends down, soothes his head and face, and whispers

in his ear.  When he slowly rises to his feet,

we leave the Yiddish bookstore.  While we walk

slowly to the car, the Yiddish fellow hops,

and skips, and dances ahead of us.  “He’s

over the convulsion already,” I said.

“Does he really have a brother?”  She nods.

“Is his brother really in the army?”

She shrugs her shoulders.

“Is his mother alive?” She nods her head.

“Hia mother lives the other side of Jerusalem

in her sun-whitened cardboard box.  She overlooks

The Wailing Wall.”   I expect her Yiddish

cousin to fall and flail in another fit,

but not in front of the prison gates

 

Icy Geography

He rose out of Russia,

out of that cold place,

out of the ground of Georgia.

Where snow covers houses

  with no second story;

Where there are few trees

  few fireplaces, few woodpiles,

  few wooden houses,  few

    who know how to stack wood

    neatly with no space between pieces;

that place where Stalin grew a mustache

                     and grew strong like stonewalls.

That place where Stalin murdered for low

        woodpiles and for scrimpy wood shavings:

This was the birthplace of that

  Yiddish fellow:   the victim of icy geography,

  of the murders of Stalin who left him alive and

  persecuted the fellow’s mother and brother.