SHIRIM: A JEWISH POETRY JOURNAL

Reflections

You have asked in what way has being Jewish influenced my poetry. It is almost too broad a question to be answered, something like the question "How has being a man influenced your poetry?" or "How has being an American influenced your poetry?"

One's religion, one's Judaism, becomes so much a part of the fabric of living that, at fortysix, I find it hard to distinguish my Jewishness from my character, or temperament, things that are notoriously difficult to identify and describe in one's self. I am argumentative, and Jews are said to be argumentative. I have a passion for law and language and moral questions, and Jews are known for their preoccupation with such things. Yet I might have had all these qualities and been like my father-in-law, a Methodist theologian. "Oh what a gift the giftie gie us/ To see ourselves as others see us," goes the Scots prayer; and I suppose that my Jewishness, and Judaism in general, like my character, remains something of a mystery to me, a thing I am always trying to figure out.

My mother is Episcopalian, my father Jewish, so I had to choose to be a Jew. At eleven and twelve I was sufficiently aware of the philosophical, historical and aesthetic differences between Christianity and Judaism to make an informed decision. And though I have learned a great deal more about religion and life I have never had any reason to doubt the choice I made at twelve. I grew up in a neighborhood of Jews and I am a Jew by temperament; I felt a certain warmth of passion as well as natural common sense and intellectual rigor that I soon found, in my travels, was common to Jews everywhere. Baptists may feel that way about Baptists and Buddhists about Buddhists. I feel that way about Jews.

Since my mother was not a Jew I had to undergo the rites of conversion before Bar Mitzvah. My Jewish friends teased me good-naturedly about my Jewish mother. Despite all I have said about my natural affection for the Jewish community I have always felt, to some extent, like an outsider. But is this not a disposition of character and temperament? Isn't the poet always an outsider? And isn't the Jew, historically, an outsider, as he moves from culture to culture maintaining his ancient ways?

I married a woman who is not Jewish, increasing my sense of isolation, as far as being a Jew is concerned. Yet I still go to the synagogue, and celebrate the customs of Hanukah and Passover in a home that is not thoroughly Jewish. Orthodox Jews would argue that I am not really a Jew at all, yet I am more similar to them than I am different, more similar to them than they would like to admit.

In all of these poems I am exploring my own peculiar Judaism as well as what I take to be characteristically Jewish themes: How shall we act in a world where it is so difficult to determine right from wrong? What is the Law? And how shall the Jew become a part of American culture while maintaining his Jewish identity? How shall a man or woman be part of a community while he nurtures his poetic vision as an outsider?

Poems

Dutch

Dutch in the wire cage, burning away with electrified stylus, or working the dye in slow along the pinpricks, a handful of flesh at a time. High musk of burnt flesh like the back street meat markets. He is some kind of artist. My mother thought otherwise, jerking coke at the bar, six months out of the flatlands she married into this garden of earthly delights: the ninth street shooting gallery, peep show carnival and Dutch the tatooist, a living advertisement of his own genius and the skill of his masters, not a square foot of unadorned flesh on his whole body. She would lead the drunk boys out by the elbow, whispering "this is no way to prove yourself a man," recalling her uncle Mack raving drunk clawing at vein-blue snakes drawn up his arms, or a tale her sailor father told of a Swedish boy shy of the needle, who dreamed his fear out loud and woke tangled in the ship's hammock, twisted in a nightmare and the crew knew it. And how they pitched in to get the young Swede drunk and strapped him to the mess table and hired a French tatooist aboard with his packet of needles and rare dyes. He worked a great clipper ship on the boy's chest with full rigging where wind would catch full in the sails when the blood cleared. My mother would lead them away from the wire cage while her father-in-law shouted to his son from the cash register: "You bring a shiksa into a place of business..." and mother: "What kind of a Jew grows rich from writing on a man's body? Your laws cry out against it." And the old man again: "We are not Gods to make our laws for other men." I write on your clean skin, my people, and then dream the world will see you as you were made.

Silence

When at last you would not answer me
I listened like a spy at Heaven's door
and conjured up a dawning, soundless country
where thought became its own best orator;

where crickets snag no louder than the moon
and starlight made more music than light rain.
O echo of an echo, reverie,
thunder tiptoed down from the soft mountain

where I filled the air with love words once
and wrote in granite to outlive my age.
now though I sweep the verses from this page,
the blank space cannot capture that silence.

The Cages

On the sixth day of Passover,
The first warm day of the year
The zoo is full of Jews,
orthodox Jews in gabardine,

Bearded grandfathers, students
Wearing yarmulkes or black
Fedoras tipped jauntily back,
Making the most of the breeze.

Young men push baby carriages
Along the aisle of cages;
Mothers in full skirts,
Babushkaed old women

Lead grandchildren to peer
Into the lion's den,
Eye a hyena and laugh
At the tumbling monkey and bear,

Marvel at the tiger
Whose coat is a tracing of bars,
Those furious pacing jaguars
Measuring their freedom

Under a boundless sky.
Jews of all ages come
Out of the house of bondage
On the finest day of the year

And April sunlight casts
Shadows of iron bars
On the children's curious faces
As they pass among the cages.