Horace - Odes I:5 - Quis Multa Gracilis (What Slender Youth)

Horace - Odes I:5 - Quis Multa Gracilis (What Slender Youth)

What lovely youth in what rose-scented lair

Now lays his handsome head upon your lap?

For whom now do you comb your yellow hair,

And set with coy simplicity the trap?

How often will he deplore his wretched fate

Like one who in fair weather sets to sea

And strikes the tempest when it is too late

To win again his lost tranquillity.

Now he believes you golden through and through,

Ever good-humoured, ever kind and sweet,

He cannot find a single fault in you

Nor tell true currency from counterfeit.

Unhappy he who has not known your love,

Unhappier he who has: – and as for me,

That votive slab, these dripping garments prove

I too have suffered shipwreck in that sea.

DUFF COOPER (1890-1954)

Cooper was a British politician and statesman. You can read about him here.

This translation is found in Horace, Poems, ed. Paul Quarrie, New York: Knopf, 2015, pp. 29-30.

Professional Spanish Knocks on the Door - by Elisabet Velasquez

 

Professional Spanish Knocks on the Door (click the title to learn more about this poem and the poet, and to hear her read it)

Elisabet Velasquez

At first we don’t answer.  Knocks that loud usually mean 5-0 is on the other end.                                  Señora ábrenos la puerta porfavor.                                  Estamos aquí para platicar con usted.                                  No queremos llamar la policía. The person on the other side of the door is speaking professional Spanish. Professional Spanish is fake friendly. Is a warning. Is a downpour when you Just spent your last twenty dollars on a wash and set. Is the kind of Spanish that comes to take things away from you. The kind of Spanish that looks at your Spanish like it needs help. Professional Spanish of course doesn’t offer help. It just wants you to know that it knows you need some. Professional Spanish is stuck up like most people from the hood who get good jobs. Professional Spanish is all like I did it you can do it too. Professional Spanish thinks it gets treated better than us because it knows how to follow the rules. Because it says Abrigo instead of Có. Because it knows which fork belongs to the salad and which spoon goes in the coffee. Because it gets to be the anchor on Telemundo and Univision and we get to be the news that plays behind its head in the background.

Copyright © 2021 by Elisabet Velasquez. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 21, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

A Love Note - by Adeeba Shahid Talukder

 

A Love Note (Click the title to learn more about this poem and the poet)

Adeeba Shahid Talukder

for Willem My love, you are water upon water upon water until it turns azure, mountainous. The horizon fills like sand between glass marbles. So much has passed between us— last night you told me to press your hand harder and harder as I pained. The sunset was at its last embers. The dark was stealing the blue light from our room. I was falling into you. ~ ~ Compress water and it turns to ice— compress beauty and it loses breath. Gaze at it too long, and even the wide mirror of the ocean will shatter. ~ ~ My Willem, between us, God has descended in all His atoms. We have not yet learned to hold Him. Copyright © 2021 by Adeeba Shahid Talukder. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 20, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

Julia Alvarez - Are We All Ill With Acute Loniness

Poem of the Day

"ARE WE ALL ILL WITH ACUTE LONELINESS"

Are we all ill with acute loneliness,

chronic patients trying to recover

the will to love? Yet all we've suffered

from others and ourselves, all the losses

of faith in the human face - when we glimpsed

the animal in the mother's grimace

or in the lover's grin as he promised

the promise no one can keep - made us lapse

back into our separateness. We all feel

absence like a wound. Sometimes the love

of another wounded one acts like a salve

which soothes the dying self but cannot heal

our lives. And perhaps this is what it feels

like to be human, and we are all well?

Julia Alvarez (1950-)

The Prophet (Poem)

 The Prophet

by Jim Morgan 

When Jonah got the call, he freaked out,

refused to go, jumped a ship--

Tarshish--the other direction.

It was too much, the burden--

Prophecy. A prophecy that,

in the end, was only four words:

“Forty days; Nineveh overturned.”

What’s more-- everyone heard.

Nineveh changed. No fire. No brimstone.

And Greta? Her call came when she was eleven--

A lesson at school, a burden

her brain would not put down.

No boat for Greta--that would come later.

Her escape: stop eating, waste away.

Her body stopped growing as her mind

sharpened to a single point:

“We do not know how long;

the world will burn.”

Jonah tried, but couldn’t escape--

the storm, the fish, three days inside.

Greta’s prophecy burrowed into her,

eating at her for years. But
when it began to emerge, it built her up.

She started alone, a knapsack and a sign.

One person joined. Then two, then three--

The growth became boundless,

not just a city but the world.

“Jonah’s tidings reached the King.”

Not just Greta’s tidings but Greta herself

went to the top: schooling, at sixteen, 

Presidents, Prime Ministers, Popes.

Useless to mock her. No one can

demean her because it is not about her.

It is her burden, her frail frame 

simply the vessel.

Nineveh and Nineveh’s King:

they listened. 

How will we respond 

to Greta’s call?

Cochlear Implant Update #1

 

Today, Friday, exactly a month after the “installation” of my cochlear implant, my audiologist flipped on the transmitter and I’ll spend the next six months or so training my brain to integrate two distinct streams of auditory information. This evening at services will be the first time you’ll have an opportunity to see me in my new “cyborg” status. 

Meditations on Music and Prayer during the COVID-19 Crisis

Meditations on Music and Prayer during the COVID-19 Crisis

A few weeks back, in one of our first forays into on-line Torah study, Petra Joseph spoke about the centrality of animal sacrifice in our tradition and wondered how one could pray for the reestablishment of Temple and the Sacrificial Cult. I recall that we had a good conversation, but for me it felt unfinished: I had not been able to convey effectively the notion that in prayer, the specific words we utter might not matter nearly as much as the intention and emotion we place on them. This slippage between the literal and the emotional is among the reasons I tend towards singing rather than declamation when I lead services.

At around the same time, a friend and colleague, Rabbi Lior Nevo, who is the Chaplain at the Jack Satter House in Revere, texted me to ask if I would like to meet her, her family, and some other families in the courtyard of the Cohen Residences (112 Centre Street) in Brookline, one of the buildings where I serve as Chaplain. Lior lives nearby and had the idea of putting on an outdoor concert for the residents of the building. I would play my guitar and lead the group in a couple of songs. I suggested “This Land is Your Land” and “Down by the Riverside.” She suggested “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “You Are My Sunshine.” Lior’s daughter brought her ukulele. A crowd of about 15 people, all standing 6 or more feet apart, serenaded first one and then the other side of the building. The response was overwhelming. Residents opened their windows despite the chill, danced, and sang along. One woman made signs: “Thank You” and “God Bless You”; through her open window she yelled, “You’ve saved my life!” Somehow, in that brief singalong, the coronavirus spell that had kept us all so separate evaporated and we were together again. 

Soon we were making plans for more concerts (so far I have participated in 4, although there have been many more, as well as dance parties with a dj, without me). The next one was at Jack Satter House in Revere, which was among the hot spots for COVID cases in Eastern Massachusetts. Residents were quarantined in their rooms; staff and volunteers were (and still are) making daily phone calls to check on people’s health and, in a few cases, to let them vent their frustrations with sheltering at home; and in general morale was low. The songs were largely the same, although I brought one of the favorites from my in-person sing-alongs at Cohen: “Bye Bye Love.” As it was in Brookline, the response in Revere was ecstatic. This time, staff came out to sing and dance along and to yell greetings to the residents they had not seen for what felt like a long while (note that it was a month ago). Again residents made signs and stuck them in their windows, so staff responded by making signs of their own. Lior described the effect of this concert as the transformational--the mood in the building shifted from shock and horror to determined solidarity. The worst had not yet come--in all, 11 JSH residents would die among the 23 who contracted the illness--but there was a new sense that the community would survive even if too many of its members would not. 

Amid all of this joy there was an odd moment. After we had played a rollicking version of  “Bye Bye Love” one, Lior and another of my colleagues balked at repeating it. Why? Is it not just an anodyne rock’n roll song? On the contrary, they declared it morbid; “why are we singing about loneliness and saying ‘I feel like I could die’?” I deferred to them and we broke into “You Are My Sunshine.” Or I should say that they broke into it, because I could not grasp the strain to play it on the guitar. Standing aside for a moment allowed me to ponder the words: “If you leave me and love another, You’ll regret it all someday”; and later: “I always loved you and made you happy, and nothing else could come between, but now you’ve left me to love another, you have shattered all my dreams.” “How is this any better?” I thought. And how odd that this song is a favorite lullaby of American parents everywhere--as though they want to signal to their children early on that any attempt at independence will lead to regret and heartbreak. 

In both cases, the objections are reasonable. They are also beside the point. “Bye Bye Love” is a glorious break-up song: we’re singing about emptiness and loss, but we’re doing so to a beat that makes it clear that life is far from over: we’re going out dancing! And although “You Are My Sunshine” is an anthem to passive-aggression, we sing it with a tenderness that transforms the weirdly twisted words into a paean to familial love. Both of these emotions--joyous determination to carry on in the face of death and deep love between the generations--were central to the power of these concerts, so really we couldn’t do without either of the songs. 

That said, Lior, who grew up in Israel and is not familiar with American “oldies,” has a hard time with the strangeness of “Bye Bye Love.” And although I can’t count the number of times I sang “You Are My Sunshine” to my children and later to older people in my care, I can’t quite shake the incongruence of the words and music. This incongruence, I think, lies at the heart of much of the strangeness of prayer, especially with texts whose explicit content--like those concerning animal sacrifice--seems incompatible with what we would really like to say. But if we focus on the fact that so much of what we say is in how and why we are saying it (or, preferably, singing it while dancing), we might find our way into those texts and, eventually perhaps, figure out what we mean when we sing them.