Poem for 5/26/22 - The Dead Man in My Briefcase by Robert Tabak

 

The Dead Man in My Briefcase

By Rabbi Robert Tabak

I’m carrying another dead man in my briefcase.
He’s not heavy.
He’s a yellow 4x6 card with a few dry facts.
A date, a time, a gunshot wound, a medical record number.

No name.
No age.
No family contact.
No information on whom to notify.
No personal information.

Another patient arrived with no pulse.
Another broken body surrounded by a dozen trauma team members.
Another death called, a time noted, a request for the body bag.

I ask the head surgeon for a moment of silence.
We are silent.
The detectives have left.
The environmental staff begins cleaning the blood off the floor.
The body has gone to the medical examiners.

He must have had a name, but I never knew it.

Family never arrived.
There is no parent or sister or girlfriend here needing support.
He was just “Trauma Patient.”
He was never admitted.
He was never really in the hospital records.
It is almost as if he were never really here.

There is no need to pass the yellow card on to another chaplain.
I can shred the card.
I can put it in a bin for sensitive data
And it will be gone.

Just like the young black man
whose name I never knew.

I can’t carry the yellow card around forever.
Maybe tomorrow I will get rid of it.
or the next day.

But for now,
I am carrying the dead man in my briefcase
and in my heart.

Rabbi Robert Tabak (RRC '77), PhD, BCC, was a staff chaplain at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania from 2001–2015. This poem appeared in the 2015 issue of Stylus: A Medical Humanities Literature and Art Journal. An earlier version of this poem appeared in the December 2014 newsletter of Neshama: Association of Jewish Chaplain.

 Memento by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Like a reminder of this life
of trams, sun, sparrows,
and the flighty uncontrolledness
of streams leaping like thermometers,
and because ducks are quacking somewhere
above the crackling of the last, paper-thin ice,
and because children are crying bitterly
(remember children's lives are so sweet!)
and because in the drunken, shimmering starlight
the new moon whoops it up,
and a stocking crackles a bit at the knee,
gold in itself and tinged by the sun,
like a reminder of life,
and because there is resin on tree trunks,
and because I was madly mistaken
in thinking that my life was over,
like a reminder of my life -
you entered into me on stockinged feet.
You entered - neither too late nor too early -
at exactly the right time, as my very own,
and with a smile, uprooted me
from memories, as from a grave.
And I, once again whirling among
the painted horses, gladly exchange,
for one reminder of life,
all its memories.

1974

Translated by Arthur Boyars and Simon Franklin

Poem for 5/23/22 - Chicago by Carl Sandburg

 Chicago

BY CARL SANDBURG

Hog Butcher for the World,

   Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

   Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;

   Stormy, husky, brawling,

   City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.

And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.

And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,

   Bareheaded,

   Shoveling,

   Wrecking,

   Planning,

   Building, breaking, rebuilding,

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,

Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,

Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,

Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,

                   Laughing!

Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

n/a

Source: Poetry (Poetry Foundation, 1914)

 

Apostrophe

Liza Katz Duncan

Ocean, every so often, a kitchen tile or child’s toy  rises from you, years after the hurricane’s passed.  This time, the disaster was somewhere else.  The disaster was always somewhere else, until it wasn’t.  Punctuation of the morning after: comma between red sky and sailors’ warning; white space where a storm cloud lowers.  Where the bay breaks away, the sentence ends: a waning crescent of peninsula, barely visible  but for the broken buildings, the ambulance lights.  Ocean, even now, even shaken, you hold the memory  of words, of worlds that failed slowly, then all at once. A flotilla of gulls falls onto you, mourners draped in slate.

 

Do/Do Not

Nisha Atalie

I sniff the blooming tiger lily, two tongues sprung open from one mouth. I poison the river unintentionally. I walk on the designated paths. I splice the mountain, its body and mouth gaping. I collect rainwater in a wheelbarrow. I line the whale’s belly with gifts until they rupture its stomach. I water the strawberries. Again I fill my gas tank with dead things, generations spun together until shiny. I feed the ducks fresh lettuce. I maneuver the dead squirrel on the road, mark the moment when creature becomes meat. I accept that my love is a poisonous flower, routinely fatal. I calculate the force of loving in each glittering death. All day on this land, in the deep forest, the electric greens and still-wet mud writhe with life. The pond gurgles and whispers. Everyone here knows to shudder when they see me coming. The mangos arrive unbruised at the grocery store. The wolves should start running.

Poem for 5/10/22 - Hindu Prayer to Love - from Raimundo Panniker, The Vedic Experience

Prayer to Love - from Raimundo Panniker, The Vedic Experience

in George Appleton, ed., The Oxford Book of Prayer (Oxford, 1985), p. 284

Love is the firstborn, loftier than the Gods,

the Fathers and men,

You, O Love, are the eldest of all,

altogether mighty.

To you we pay homage!

Greater than the quarters and directions, the expanses

and vistas of the sky,

you, O Love, are the eldest of all,

altogether mighty.

To you we pay homage!

Greater than all things moving and inert,

than the Ocean, O Passion,

you, O Love, are the eldest of all,

altogether mighty.

To you we pay homage!

In many a form of goodness, O Love,

you show your face.

Grant that these forms may penetrate

within our hearts.

Send elsewhere all malice!

Poem for 5/9/22 - Al idioma alemán (To the German Language) by Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges

Al idioma alemán (translation below)

Mi destino es la lengua castellana,

El bronce de Francisco de Quevedo,

Pero en la lenta noche caminada,

Me exaltan otras músicas más íntimas.

Alguna me fue dada por la sangre—

Oh voz de Shakespeare y de la Escritura—,

Otras por el azar, que es dadivoso,

Pero a ti, dulce lengua de Alemania,

Te he elegido y buscado, solitario.

A través de vigilias y gramáticas,

De la jungla de las declinaciones,

Del diccionario, que no acierta nunca

Con el matiz preciso, fui acercándome.

Mis noches están llenas de Virgilio,

Dije una vez; también pude haber dicho

de Hölderlin y de Angelus Silesius.

Heine me dio sus altos ruiseñores;

Goethe, la suerte de un amor tardío,

A la vez indulgente y mercenario;

Keller, la rosa que una mano deja

En la mano de un muerto que la amaba

Y que nunca sabrá si es blanca o roja.

Tú, lengua de Alemania, eres tu obra

Capital: el amor entrelazado

de las voces compuestas, las vocales

Abiertas, los sonidos que permiten

El estudioso hexámetro del griego

Y tu rumor de selvas y de noches.

Te tuve alguna vez. Hoy, en la linde

De los años cansados, te diviso

Lejana como el álgebra y la luna.

(1972)

To The German Language

My destiny is in the Spanish language,

the bronze words of Francisco de Quevedo,

but in the long, slow progress of the night,

different, more intimate musics move me.

Some have been handed down to me by blood--

voices of Shakespeare, language of the Scriptures--

others by chance, which has been generous;

but you, gentle language of Germany,

I chose you, and I sought you out alone.

By way of grammar books and patient study,

through the thick undergrowth of the declensions,

the dictionary, which never puts its thumb on

the precise nuance, I kept moving closer.

My nights were full of overtones of Virgil,

I once said; but I could as well have named

Hölderlin, Angelus Silesius.

Heine lent me his lofty nightingales;

Goethe, the good fortune of late love,

at the same time both greedy and indulgent:

Keller, the rose which one hand leaves behind

in the closed fist of a dead man who adored it,

who will never know if it is white or red.

German language, you are your masterpiece:

love interwound in all your compound voices

and open vowels, Sounds which accommodate

the studious hexameters of Greek

and undercurrents of jungles and of nights.

Once, I had you. Now, at the far extreme

of weary years, I feel you have become

as out of reach as algebra and the moon.

 

Poem for Mother's Day - The Lanyard by Billy Collins

 The Lanyard

BY BILLY COLLINS

The other day I was ricocheting slowly

off the blue walls of this room,

moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,

from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,

when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary

where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist

could send one into the past more suddenly—

a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp

by a deep Adirondack lake

learning how to braid long thin plastic strips

into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard

or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,

but that did not keep me from crossing

strand over strand again and again

until I had made a boxy

red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,

and I gave her a lanyard.

She nursed me in many a sick room,

lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,

laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,

and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,

and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.

Here are thousands of meals, she said,

and here is clothing and a good education.

And here is your lanyard, I replied,

which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,

strong legs, bones and teeth,

and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,

and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

And here, I wish to say to her now,

is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,

but the rueful admission that when she took

the two-tone lanyard from my hand,

I was as sure as a boy could be

that this useless, worthless thing I wove

out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

 

“The Lanyard” from The Trouble With Poetry: and Other Poems by Billy Collins, copyright © 2005 by Billy Collins. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. 

Poem for 5/5/22 - Israel Independence Day - An Arab Shepherd is Searching for His Goat on Mount Zion by Yehuda Amichai

An Arab Shepherd is Searching for His Goat on Mount Zion

Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch

An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
and on the opposite mountain I am searching
for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
both in their temporary failure.
Our voices meet
above the Sultan's Pool in the valley between us.
Neither of us wants
the child or the goat to get caught in the wheels
of the terrible Had Gadya machine.

Afterward we found them among the bushes
and our voices came back inside us, laughing and crying.

Searching for a goat or a son
has always been the beginning
of a new religion in these mountains.

Poems for 5/4/22 - Two Poems by May Sarton - from Letters from Maine (1985)

Two Poems by May Sarton

from Letters from Maine (1985)

The Wood Pigeons

The wood pigeons

Punctuate the silence

With coos, over and over,

Over and over,

One long, three shorts,

Then pause,

Then resume.

Nothing else moves

Or makes a sound,

Flat blue sky

Over silent shining sea.

Peace

Interrupted

By the wood pigeons

Insistent, monotonous

"Spring is coming

Spring is coming."

Coo, coo-coo,

How can we stand it?

Madness is in the air.

April in Maine

The days are cold and brown,

Brown fields, no sign of green,

Brown twigs, not even swelling,

And dirty snow in the woods.

But as the dark flows in

The tree frogs begin

Their shrill sweet singing,

And we lie on our beds

Through the ecstatic night,

Wide awake, cracked open.

There will be no going back.

Poem for 5/3/22 - I, 10 from The Book of Mercies by Leonard Cohen

From The Book of Mercies, by Leonard Cohen

I, 10

You have sweetened your word on my lips. My son too has heard the song that does not belong to him. From Abraham to Augustine, the nations have not known you, though every cry, every curse is raised on the foundation of your holiness. You placed me in this mystery and you let me sing, though only from this curious corner. You bound me to my fingerprints, as you bind every man, except the ones who need no binding. You led me to this field where I can dance with a broken knee. You led me safely to this night, you gave me a crown of darkness and light, and tears to greet my enemy. Who can tell of your glory, who can number your forms, who dares expound the interior life of god? And now you feed my household, you gather them to sleep, to dream, to dream freely, you surround them with the fence of all that I have seen. Sleep, my son, my small daughter, sleep - this night, this mercy has no boundaries.

Poem for 5/2/22 - The Big Heart by Anne Sexton

 The Big Heart by Anne Sexton

"Too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold." - From an essay by W. B. Yeats

Big heart,
wide as a watermelon,
but wise as birth,
there is so much abundance
in the people I have:
Max, Lois, Joe, Louise,
Joan, Marie, Dawn,
Arlene, Father Dunne,
and all in their short lives
give to me repeatedly,
in the way the sea
places its many fingers on the shore,
again and again
and they know me,
they help me unravel,
they listen with ears made of conch shells,
they speak back with the wine of the best region.
They are my staff.
They comfort me.

They hear how
the artery of my soul has been severed
and soul is spurting out upon them,
bleeding on them,
messing up their clothes,
dirtying their shoes.
And God is filling me,
though there are times of doubt
as hollow as the Grand Canyon,
still God is filling me.
He is giving me the thoughts of dogs,
the spider in its intricate web,
the sun
in all its amazement,
and a slain ram
that is the glory,
the mystery of great cost,
and my heart,
which is very big,
I promise it is very large,
a monster of sorts,
takes it all in--
all in comes the fury of love.