NVN Tuesday: From Torah and Talmud, Two Poems
“GRAVITY WILL GET US” by Alan Walowitz and “MY PRAYERS FOR HOSTAGES DIDN'T END WHEN MY PRAYERS FOR PEACE BEGAN” by Laurie Rosen
GRAVITY WILL GET US
by Alan Walowitz
“Just last night, there were shots fired outside of Temple Israel in Albany. And just yesterday, the menorah of Chabad Sunset Park in Brooklyn was vandalized.” —Mayor Eric Adams, December 8, 2023
*
Some of us are willing to wait till our native caution fails on the worn and slippery stairs. No matter our disparate falls in the garden, or the desert, the reclaimed land, or holding the safe door tight, against the next volley. It all becomes so much the same in the short history of you and me. Today it’s news, tomorrow we’re gone. Who has the will to study and learn, as Torah demands, such a short stay?. Everyone’s bound to fall, even the lithe and balletic among us give way to age and our own sad shuffling. Some will make a thud when we hit the ground, some a noise of lesser note, as we learn, again, as if we didn’t know, this is not a movie. No shot, no bang, no dying fall. Sometimes a shatter will sound before we get the sharp reminder what the slimmest shard might do. Let me hide in plain sight long as I can— I’ll agree to shut my mouth for now. My forebears knew how to sound grateful, and content, the price for being taken in. But one dyspeptic uncle, always a stranger, warned never to feel safe—even here, in The Golden Land. Hah! his voice-- though not heard for years-- now rings like an alarm in my ears: Boychik, you just wait and see.
*
Alan Walowitz is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry. His chapbook Exactly Like Love comes from Osedax Press. The full-length The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems is available from Truth Serum Press. Most recently, from Arroyo Seco Press, is the chapbook In the Muddle of the Night written with poet Betsy Mars. Now available for free download is the collection The Poems of the Air from Red Wolf Editions.
*
MY PRAYERS FOR HOSTAGES DIDN'T END WHEN MY PRAYERS FOR PEACE BEGAN
by Laurie Rosen
With college campuses seized by conflict over the war, is there anywhere for students who don’t want to choose a side to turn? Image by Yoav Einhar. —Forward, December 6, 2023
*
For every child kidnapped, burned, bombed I believe there is someone on both sides grieving the pain of the other, hearing cries from the other, growing wary of taking sides. For every yes, but someone is saying this is true and so is this, Elu v’elu divrei Elohim chayim: these and these. For every life displaced, beaten, brutalized I believe in the hope of two hands holding multiple truths, two hands plowing a path for compassion and peace.
*
Laurie Rosen is a lifelong New Englander. Her poetry has appeared in Peregrine, Gyroscope Review, The New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, The Inquisitive Eater: a journal of The New School, One Art, and elsewhere. Laurie won first place in poetry at the 2023 Marblehead, MA Festival of the Arts.
Beautifully and painfully articulated fears and visions in the "From Torah & Talmud". Our fears echoed in "stranger uncle's warning" and our deepest, tear soaked belief in the humanity of holding together, "hands on a plow", breaking bread.