NVN Tuesday: 2 Poems
"FIRING MORAH" by Stacey Z Lawrence and "MY FATHER'S TREES" by Rikki Santer
FIRING MORAH
by Stacey Z Lawrence
Morah Hebrew School Teacher Mug
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I lean on a miniature sea blue chair, the color of Israel & conduct my class to the curtain call with a rudimentary rendition of Hatikvah. The boys & girls adjust their babushkas torn from superhero sheets. They pretend to be partisans, they pretend to survive genocide with water guns & plastic bricks plopping the toy props across the stage like burial plots & the synagogue chapel explodes in waves of gratitude reigning down, micro-rubble crushed under rubber spinning & spinning strikes me as my students hold hands swaying like paper cut-outs mouthing Hebrew words they do not understand squinting & studying me, their Morah’s lips we blast out this anthem beak fed from birth myths spun from milk, guts, honey & the soot of charred Jews chanting hollow prayers into green wind we cradle some bald-cackling madcap who flies rabid dragonflies beyond his fancy fence like Dylan Klebold with a broken console Boom, Boom, Kaboom, Fizz, Kaboom, Fizzle, Silence. He crunches on fried falafel tossing bits of chicks & peas, digging the edge of that six-pointed star between his yellow teeth planting olive trees & Long Island Zionists beneath Alephs & Bets like Herzl’s Thieves of the West his flying monkeys, stripping us of our Ashkenazi selves our Yiddish, our guttural cadence, depositing our smoldering mishpocha us Kikes still stinking of Zyklon B, bitter the almond smell of neglected eggs, shoveling us beneath BritishpoundsAmericandollars, wailing limestone.
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Author's note: I was an Anti-Zionist Hebrew School Teacher. In December of 2023, days after the congregation celebrated my work with my students, the local synagogue fired me, prohibiting my entrance forever. It was the first night of Chanukah.
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Stacey Z Lawrence is a veteran teacher of English and a Literature Professor. She has an MAT in Theater and Speech and is a poet for Writing The Land, a collaboration between poets and protected land. Her poetry was shortlisted for the Fish Prize in 2019, and 2021 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2022. Stacey’s first collection of poems Fall Risk was released to acclaim in August 2021 through Finishing Line Press.
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MY FATHER'S TREES
by Rikki Santer
The Yatir Forest in Israel ends at the border with Palestine. The largest human-created forest in Israel, 12-square-mile Yatir was created in the 1960s on semi-arid land with four million trees, 90 percent of them Aleppo pine. —National Geographic, March 24, 2023
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after Hamas, after Gaza
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A ring of trees in Israel encircle his legacy, a memorial from his bowling buddies three decades ago. The certificate declared from Leviticus: When you come to the land you shall plant trees. My father never visited that land and neither have I but I trust his trees are there still in the Negev Desert perhaps an arboreal Heinz 57 of carob, redbud, olive, almond, pear, cypress, cedar, and oak. Bologna sauce is what my father cooed he’d squeeze out of me when his hugs were hymns in gratitude for finally finding the good life with wife, daughter, son. His ideas of assimilated Jewish migrated to my secular shaping. Synagogue just on high holidays, Sabbath just another Friday night for cheeseburgers and Hogan’s Heroes. And Zionist? He was more B’nai Brith bowling league and temple dues. These days I imagine his Israeli trees forsaken by milk and honey. Their roots sponging up bloodshed. Their skins trembling with gunfire and bomb. Their bent architecture davening a shameful Kaddish. Their barren fractals of branches reaching and reaching for nothing but air.
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Rikki Santer’s poetry has been published widely and has received many honors including several Pushcart and Ohioana book award nominations, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 2023 she was named Ohio Poet of the Year. She is currently serving as vice-president of the Ohio Poetry Association and is a member of the teaching artist roster of the Ohio Arts Council. Her twelfth poetry collection Resurrection Letter: Leonora, Her Tarot, and Me is a sequence in tribute to the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington.