You Cannot Think the Book of Life Will Close

You cannot think the book of life will close.
Opportunity must seem a right.
Most days contain a trace of paradise,
Kindling the hope that God is nice
Instead of just or loving or pure light.
Prepare for what is not what you propose:
Perhaps you think your prayers will suffice,
Unburdening your heart with hunger slight.
Repentance takes much more than you suppose.

You Pray Not for Yourself Alone but All

You pray not for yourself alone but all.
One never chooses sin in isolation.
Most evil is not merely personal.
Kindness looks for common inspiration.
In every act there is community.
Perhaps one would prefer it were not so.
Placing each's guilt on all may be
Unfair, but then each righteous soul must see
Reflections of itself in every woe.
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Revenge Is Often Taken in the Mind

Revenge is often taken in the mind.
Open wounds untreated tend to bleed.
Some who else would be both good and kind
Hate others in the thought, if not the deed.
Have mercy, then, upon yourself, and clear
Away the anger twisting you inside,
Sanctifying for the coming year
Heart and spirit, cleansed of pain and pride.
As you ask forgiveness, so forgive,
Nor need you lose your honor with your fury.
All find their just reward in how they live,
Held to account by a less partial jury.
Rosh Hashana Opens to the Page
Rosh Hashanah opens to the page
On which is writ, for good or ill, our fate.
Still wrestling with angels, we engage,
Harrowing our hearts, our destined state.
However, "we" encompasses us all,
As though we were but droplets in a wave
Suspended on its journey to the shore,
Hard put to any single droplet save.
And so we pray not only for ourselves,
Nor only for our family, friends, or tribe:
All must be our congregation, else,
Having thus lost hope, we won't survive.
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Remember the Utility of Shame

Remember the utility of shame,
On which in part our decency depends.
Such sentiments evolve to serve our ends,
Harrowing the mask behind the name.
How apt that to ourselves we be revealed
As time pauses in between the years,
Season of incantatory tears,
Harrowed for the sins we have concealed.
Allow your shame full access to your heart,
Nor flinch from bearing witness to your part,
As only what is treated can be healed.
Return Each Year to Test the Ancient Waters
Return each year to test the ancient waters,
Opening the unaccustomed heart.
So may you retain a Jewish soul,
Having given it its yearly outing.
Here your parents meet your sons and daughters,
A junction wrought by well-established art,
Severing the spirit from the role,
Holding in its golden words your routing.
All you're left with is what really matters,
Needing, to be whole, to be a part,
At least this once a year a Jew of old,
Holy in this place despite your doubting.
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How Might I, in Faith, Do as You Ask

How might I, in faith, do as You ask?
Innocent, I hung upon Your Word,
Great with the intention to be good.
However, here life flows the other way.
How might I remove the inner mask,
Opening my heart to the absurd,
Letting go the righteousness I would
Yet have between the truth and what I say.
Deliver me, then, naked to this task,
And turn away, Whom I so long have served.
Yearning to repent, as well I should,
So let me see myself in my own gaze.
Reason Ought Not Be the Enemy
Reason ought not be the enemy
Of myth, but rather its interpreter,
Showing one what else one might not see,
Hindsight to which faith might well refer.
Holding on to myth does not require
A blindness to what science has to say.
Salvation is not merely a desire
Hoped for in some long-outmoded way.
A myth, like art, sustains itself through beauty,
Not only true, but doing double duty
As both the cast of conscience and the fire,
Habitude no argument need sway.
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Holiness and Faith Are the Rewards

We'll go on, after you,
Without you we'll go on,
Though something beautiful inside
Us all has turned to stone.
We'll go on, after you,
Without you through the years
Of pain and raw bewilderment
And brutal, angry tears.
We'll go on, after you,
Without you we will heal,
Though love may labor in the heart
And joy the loss conceal.
We'll go on, after you,
Without you we will grow
Together as a family
That you will never know.
We'll go on, after you,
Without you life goes on,
But neither hope nor happiness
Undoes what you have done.
Holiness and Faith Are the Rewards
Holiness and faith are the rewards:
In doing lies the seed of one's becoming.
Given what the faithless life affords,
How could one not revel in the running?
Holy days are opportunities,
Open doors to being who one would.
Longing to be touched by grace, one sees
Yet one more chance to choose the unchanged good.
Do not think that faith is ever certain:
All one's life, like love, it comes and goes.
Yet one can always stand before the curtain,
Singing for one's soul the prayers one knows.
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Thirty-Five Years Later He Was Gone

Thirty-five years later he was gone,
Leaving her with just an empty hole
Where once her life had been. Bereft of meaning,
She rode the ancient fury of her grief.
So many years of loving him, a garden
Dissolved into a wild, wasted sea!
So much of life now waiting to be buried,
Poisoned, lying putrid in her heart!
And yet she could do nothing for awhile
But lie upon her bed of writhing pain,
Knowing that in time she would be healed,
But never, never quite completely whole.
Always there would be this frozen anger
Waiting to be placed upon the table.
No matter her attempts to be forgiving,
She would again consume that bitter meal!
And even in the sunshine of her laughter,
Her life returned to her by time and love,
Even in the meadows of her joy,
There still would be the place he left behind.
Twenty-Two Years Later They Were Dead
Twenty-two years later they were dead
And nothing was resolved, nor would it be.
Life, as is its wont, had gone ahead,
But both of them, though freed, were never free.
Both remarried, loved, fell ill, and died,
Buried separately, with space reserved
For those who mourned them most, the two outside
What once was home but could not be preserved.
What bitterness and blame, forgiveness, rage,
Guilt, shame, fury, impotence, and sorrow
Sloshed against the walls of each's cage,
A storm that never yielded to tomorrow.
How beautiful and sad, the love of youth
That, though it could not last, outlasts the truth.
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Love Was Not Enough for Us

Love was not enough for us,
Though we were much in love.
We started down the well-worn path,
But it was not to be.
Delight was not enough for us,
Nor tenderness that moved
Through years of angry dissonance
Towards some dark, bitter sea.
Our differences were far too great,
Our lives too far apart.
We didn't like each other much,
But put that truth aside
Until one day it was too late
To reignite the heart.
One told the other, who agreed
At last that it had died.
But then, ah, then! we felt our loss
As unremitting pain,
As deep and inconsolable,
Unbearable regret.
And all alone we had to cross
That desert once again
That we might know that we had loved
Too much to soon forget.
There Is No Mountain Higher than the Wall
There is no mountain higher than the wall
That comes between two people once in love.
But time can tear a mountain down with tears
As former lovers slowly move towards touch.
There is no happiness in hard, cold anger
Twisted like a girder in one's way.
The sun and rain can manage to grow flowers
Across the bleakest crust of lava plain.
So we, too, I hope, can manage friendship
Upon the battlefield of past defeat.
I would not want to lose our years of loving
To moments caught for good in bitter light.
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Jim Has Blue Eyes Flecked with Gold

Jim has blue eyes flecked with gold;
Dark-haired handsome, rock-like good.
Marriage hid him, as it should,
Until his love ran cold.
He lived only down the street.
I was married, so was he.
But when divorces left us free,
We found the chance to meet.
Now we're both far happier
Than either ever was before.
Through suffering we found the door
That opened to each other.
We'll always feel, of course, the pain.
Divorce cannot but make one bleed.
But in that pain there lay a seed
That soon would bloom again.
Love Undoes Its Heritage Quite Slowly
Love undoes its heritage quite slowly,
Spinning like a planet through its dust.
Sometimes it feels like hatred, sometimes mourning,
Sometimes pain long paralyzed by rust.
Sometimes shame of past humiliation
Wrings the heart with hands inured to toil,
And once again some drops of unspent fury
Spill upon the dry and barren soil.
Ay, me! When will it end? The seasoned sorrow
Of unforgiven trespasses of old?
No matter new love blossoming! There's somewhere
A place within untenanted and cold.
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All I Ever Wanted Is to Love You

All I ever wanted was to love you
As when I saw you first from far away.
But then it was my sweet mistake to have you
Too young to hold the demons long at bay.
For years I hated you, for only hate
Could cauterize the wounds that would not heal,
And gorged myself on fantasies to sate
A hunger I could neither suage nor feel.
Eventually, we both found other loves
And settled into other lives. And yet
The past like some unquiet ghost still moves
Within, too fraught with longing to forget.
We have moved on, as is mature and wise.
But love, though long abandoned, never dies.
Hardly a Day Goes By that I Don't Think of You
Hardly a day goes by that I don't think of you,
Mostly in anger, sometimes with hatred.
I loved you nearly half my life, and now
The bad has swallowed up the good, has eaten my heart.
How sad that I must bury so much of me!
I wish I could bury you.
The real, living you I don't want to hear about.
You were once what I lived for, and now
I don't even want to know when you are dead.
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Look Not on My Body but My Soul

Look not on my body but my soul,
Only on the face behind the veil,
Only with the touch of inner Braille,
Knowing through yourself my being whole.
Nor ought you touch my skin but with your heart,
Only in the tenderness of love.
Though my outer self repulsive prove,
Of me the mask is but a minor part.
Nor should you know me out of charity:
Misfortune can become a kind of grace,
Yielding special wisdom to a few.
Bring mainly for yourself your empathy,
Opening a richer, wider view,
Doorway to a person much like you
Yet fired by the fate he must embrace.
Sebastian
Sebastian may be blind, but he can see
Everything extant to you and me.
Because his sight is safely tucked away,
All his other senses come to play,
Singing in the sunlight of their song,
Taking bits of paradise along.
In life there is no limit to our joy,
A gift whatever senses we employ.
Nor if our hearts can see, will we go wrong.
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I'm Sorry I Can't Tell You What

I'm sorry I can't tell you what
I'm sure you'd rather hear,
But there's a burden in my heart
I can no longer bear.
There's an anger I must cross
Before I come to you
And make my peace with who you are,
And try your soul anew.
I know I wasn't what you wanted
When you wanted me,
A healthy, happy baby girl
You could raise easily.
I was born impaired, and you
Have never understood
That what I am is whole and fair
And beautiful and good.
You were sorry, first for me
And then for you, and wept,
But I would not be me without
The fact that I am deaf.
I am a gift to celebrate
And not a cause to grieve.
As a child this was what
I needed to believe.
I needed but a different road
To reach the common goal,
But you decided there were things
I couldn't do at all.
And rather than accept what life
Had given in its grace,
You looked at what life had withheld
And turned from its embrace.
Ah, Mother! How you injured me
By what you would not own!
To love myself I had to leave
And make my way alone,
And have my children in the course
Of what I would become,
But always, always looking back
To where I had no home.
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