The lines won't come

they squiggle and tangle

jumbling my thoughts

my nerves stick up

like pins in the cushion

worrying about that boat.

It prickles like heat on cactus

like mange on dog

like flies on three day old rotten fruit.

My poems have been like sheer, satin anger

like hose hanging on a line over a city balcony

as wisdom cries in the streets

and young men are lured

into the houses of whores like Netanyahu

who sits before his looking glass

applying cake makeup over blemishes

and Jezebel's eyeshadow

with a spackle knife--

The water is calm

but nothing else is

the world is chaos and shonde everywhere

filled to the brim

with antidiluvian lawlessness

And I wish on a star

for a sea change

for that little boat to reach Gaza

for a guiding light from the past

to whisper it forward

with Yiddish lullabies

until it reaches the shore.

I can see the Pale of Settlement

meeting Gaza at the crossroads.

My ancestors, whose deaths I know so well

but whose lives are covered in a silent black,

speak loudly now.

They say: keep going!

You will reach them!

Old bad ideas sink to the bottom

and what is left is all of us.

Young girls with bubbling spirit

flying kites over barbed wire,

mothers whose spines bend like the arc of history

from years of carrying pain in huge rucksacks,

men who refused to lose their humanity

growing like beanstalks through the bars of Israeli prisons

refusing to be pulled up or stamped out.

These are our people and where they go

we shall go and give thanks for our good fortune.

Take a deep breath!

Inhale the baked salt air!

Feel the water lap against your toes!

for this is our time!

Ribbons of smoke ink,

the glass

bleeds late night sky,

knocked over by the hand 

of an exacting scribe...

She screwed up!

And now there is no Torah!

Only messy splotches!

A generation is lost!

Lonesomeness

dyes in like indigo through parchment fibers

inky tendrils 

curl up like witchy fingers

in my veins

and I hurt

in the spaces between my bones.

All of us feel isolation

at one time or another

doing such painstaking work.

I try so hard not to drink down

their poison 

but it leaks through me

and I get angry, just like you say 

I should never do!

Well, imperviousness

may seem a virtue to you!

But you are not made of plastic

and I can see looking back

a little boy

his bottom lip full of sass

and his eyes welled up with

the slippery ice path

my ancestors took

through the Pale of Settlement.

Don't fret, I love his

high voice and nerdy pastimes

no matter what ruddy faced

sweaty ham headed

playground bullies tell you;

I would prefer that boy

a hundred times over

any soldier in the Israeli army

over any Paul Newman

over any Bibi Netanyahu

over anyone they say is

more man than you.

Let them taunt

Let them kill

Let them lie

because they cannot

map over

our age old line

which you 

with your master paintbrush draw

outward,

bringing traditions forward

until the points meet

today

on the surface plane;

I will write in ropes,

hash out and untangle,

knit our path

into a cabled scarf

until I figure 

this out;

a centuries-old

riddle for our people:

the boundary.

Where do we end?

Where do we begin?

Does any people ever really know?

And as I do

my words so blue

drip down into the

white wood of the threshing floor

pooling at foreign uncovered feet

the place where difference and recognition meet

and great kingdoms are conceived.

they stain 

once blonde grain

no oriental carpet thrown over

can hide the truth:

we are, as ever,

mixed, colored, integrated, amalgamated;

the ones who come after will say

it was always this way

and wonder what the fuss of those

elders was all about?

I, in my rocking chair,

plan to smile and nod

on that beautiful day

knitting loop after loop

into a brilliant pattern.

This poem is inspired by the ancestry of King David, described in the Book of Ruth 3:7-12 and by all those who believe that difference doesn't need to result in subordination.

I carry my heart with me

wherever I go;

when I skip alongside

the lip of a lily pond;

when I sink my feet

into muddy, rotten smelling, sweet and mushy

autumn trails;

when I strut my Doc Martens

on egg-fryable concrete

sidewalks,

a girl of fourteen,

hot child

strolling in big city summer;

my heart is in my chest

behind these breasts

that forced me too early 

into life as a woman;

it taps taps taps

a telltale reminder

that this heart is neither my flowering mind

nor my stinking flaws

nor my curves

bending and twisting like hairpin turns

on a long tough gravel road

jagged like broken bottles tossed over the shoulder;

my heart lives in that narrow place,

which in Hebrew, we call Mitzrayim.

But I feel you in the distance,

hoof beats and a long tail

swishing windswept rhythm,

like a train entering the station-

I will reach until the strings that

attach my bones to my limbs

are stretched noodle soft

to let me hold you

across a miracle.

That terrible ache

that comes from remembering sickness

gives way to a wide smile

and an ocean is freed from between

two cramped straits.

A vast and moving ocean,

which pipes up in gentle arpeggios and then rests;

A symphony for us to sail!

My heart is the change in movements,

a prism reflecting light in all directions.

Recognizing, like the looking glass,

the doors of justice opening to infinity

and the steady beat of the people's

marching feet returning home.

It's that time of year again

when we speak of how we used to be strangers

and in the midst of lip service paid

to plagues and lamb's blood and the arc of history bending

towards Abraham Joshua Heschel

and Martin Luther King

your face is a fresh cut blade of grass,

and its green smell makes me feel alive

on a fresh spring day, midmorning

my stomach aflutter for summertime.

From your vantage point

alone above mountaintops

the rest of us are tiny dots beneath your magnitude,

you can hear the still small voice,

same as Eliyahu,

who I hope comes to fill his empty chair this year

and drink down his cup which

as a little girl

I stared at through the whole seder

to see if the liquid had moved one inch.

I've been waiting all my life.

I've been waiting for you to follow him.

In the land of Egypt,

a jar of real life preserves

pops open like a crocus.

My hands were weak from pushing and pulling

my thumbs are sore from pressing down.

I was tempted to break it open,

because the taste of ground glass

mixed with its sugary contents

seemed preferable to 

the dry on my tongue.

That jar and I were alone like

Jesus and Lucifer

in a barren place,

like the scragglers

of the people Israel

destined to wander patiently

and wait for risk to strike them

while others raced ahead.

And suddenly...

A young man blossoms in Cairo,

and another sprouts in Irvine,

there's a young woman who crops up in New Orleans,

they try to choke her but her message polinates everything,

another blooms at Brandeis,

and one more, younger than my little cousin,

bleeds for a garden in Bengazi,

In Tel Aviv, lefty fringe dorks

who don't represent the Israeli public

plant more seeds in the yard 

of the American ambassador!

Can you believe these upstarts?

In Bil'in, a brother is welcomed home after too many years,

the shackles release with a sweet click,

a tiny twist that changes everything.

There are paper wishes lodged into the places

where stray flowers should grow;

Hearts in need of water and light

in the deepest underground places,

where a story cannot even reach.

I won't forget thee, oh Jerusalem,

but let my people's right hand forget 

about white phosphorous,

about dashing

anyone's little ones against a rock,

about waiting on nerves frayed as fringe

for the one who will rise against us,

about unleavened promises

in exchange for spoils

and riches given from trembling hands

of a Jewish generation guided by primal fear.

Let them wander for another year. 

Next year, where to?

I can feel myself caustic and briny

no sweetness lives in me;

I turn over my shoulder,

destruction for miles,

and then no more steps forward.

Nothing can grow in me,

or live in me,

a banyan has snarled its roots

around my back;

the sting is everywhere

and no flaming sword

can remove the scars.

salt cliff

salt sea

salt taste? 

For gazing a second too long maybe?

For things I know now

were bad for me but I was powerless to resist then?

For the times I was too numb from

the ocean slapping against me

to feel the love in my heart?

The idea that you and I could ever be normal

that we could erase

the history between us-

as though right now were

a rake from a Japanese garden-

swirling beautiful designs in the places

that have dried out

from neglect and scars

over old wounds-

is a soft wool blanket

making me think that I was never

abandoned.

But it is not to be

because it is not the truth.

Now I must stand face forward.

I broke through that crystallized crust

a long time ago-

and my heart came through,

tender and moist,

a fish to serve the multitudes.

I am a better person

because of it.

We share ancestry.

We draw our genes up from the same swirling pool.

You may be my brother

but you are not my blood.

You,

with the big gun and the churchmouse expression,

torching ancient trees,

a threadbare myth woven into your kippah,

you who will not see past your smoke rage

which billows opaque,

thick as Esau's meat stew:

that red trembling in your face

spills outward

onto the streets of Hebron

to shut up blue shop doors with hot crimson,

marking them.

The angels won't miss them!

They will raise a gossamer eyebrow to say:

that ugly stuff is not my blood.

You,

American Jew,

the man with a Santa Monica tan

who lobs insults to the left 

as though they were tennis balls at the club:

no integrity, no argument,

so the fuzzy bright yellow comfort

of a nasty remark must suffice.

Wine flows at fancy parties

for hip, affluent Jews like you

and glossy philanthropy is easier to swallow

than the hard pill of living for justice.

The velvet rope you place between me and home

is an air-filled capillary:

my blood does not flow there...

no one's does.

You,

baby in the basket,

plump flesh darkened from bitumen and pitch,

you who were drawn up out of the rushing water

by a bouyant and flush-cheeked foreign woman:

Come forth, already!

soft man of few words,

permanent soul sadness

after being abandoned for your own good,

Your eyes are clouds parting

to stare down Pharaoh, eye to eye,

to speak mouth to mouth with I am that I am!

Help them recognize

that rescue can only come

when we stare at the bottom of the sea together--

ready at last to leave the familiar comfort of enslavement,

when we stop pretending the barbed wire

can imprison that which endangers us

simply because we put it up with our own hands.

My blood courses and meanders

filling in riverbeds carved by the footprints of wanderers,

wanderers let go

to make a feast in the wilderness,

to seek truth,

to walk towards fear until we meet a bold embrace

from our brother.

Meet my blood at the fork in the river

-it licks over the jagged places until they are smoothe-

Let us seize this healing moment

in which we will rise high

in the sky of clear blue

like a pilot

soaring over mountaintops,

listening for the echoes of great wisdom

whispered to prophets from

generation to generation

piecing together a chain that never

stops moving. 

Yellow curls, tobacco-stained sheaves of wheat,

wave in the wind

as you dance across boundaries

you insist don't matter;

crimson glass in your left hand--

your right holds the pen

that stirs your madness;

tease and cajole,

slap and kick,

and then the sinking feeling

as my stomach drops

with an uncomfortable giggle.

My heart folds into sleep deep,

burrowed in the cavernous empty space

where another dream once lived.

You felt like a schoolyard ball

that punches the solar plexus

with a deep singing sound.

The maidens swayed softly to your music,

and my song was the deep groan 

of an underwater animal

who swells in pain beneath the surface.

Each sip you poured 

drained me;

and you cloaked yourself

in the powerless

while taking smug pleasure in watching me weaken,

in leaving my bones brittle from heartbreak;

your shtick was more choreographed than a ballet;

you were too in love with being worshipped

and with going through the motions of questioning authority,

of sticking it to the man

in that phony sixties way the young women lapped up,

to dare show us how to rise up and move

on our own.

I was your slave.

I kept your beat.

All the while protesting

but slowly losing my feet

in a terrible Tarantelle

faster and faster

racing against

the poison from your bite.

I could not shake you off.

With every move it got worse.

I could not stop spinning

like a splintery wood top,

my young girl mind 

left dessicated and barren,

tearing good men limb from limb,

too dizzy to notice

how pitiful you are!

Now I am a grown woman.

And I am wide awake.

I pulled myself back up,

ashamed and duped.

How could I have done this to myself?

I live remembering that I was

the delerious victim of a salesman,

but in motion upward nonetheless.

When I glance over my shoulder,

I see you twisting aimlessly

in the exact same place I left you,

like chaff tumbling around,

breaking into bits and particles,

you are smaller and smaller in the distance

and spark no fire under my feet anymore.

The only thing remarkable

is that my eyelids don't even flutter. 

The pen I once thought was only yours to grasp

is in my hand now.

I march alongside

the poets and the rebels

who chose to risk it all for justice;

They teach me to speak, write, live

with one foot in front of the other

with compassion

walking what we talk

until we reach real freedom, real life.

These steps we take are no delusion,

and our footprints are no dream.

She is old and young

all at once.

She carries centuries

and a language no longer spoken

in a stewpot

fastened to her back,

with a ladle to draw deep,

as she smiles, only remembering 

as far back as yesterday;

The family complains that 

her chicken has cholesterol

and that the flanken is fattening.

There is too much shiny oil

and not enough fresh green

to comport with vain standards of modern health;

But to me, the smell of onions in a pan

is beauty and perfect love

in the midst of a world malnourished

by exact measurements

and starved of substances that cannot

be easily quantified;

She knew how to love without hurting.

She loved us even when we did not love ourselves.

She forgot our infractions,

and stopped us from carrying anger in our hearts

simply by virtue of her example.

She overcooked her food and overwatered her plants.

Simple. Small. Innocent Diviner.

Her price is far above rubies.

I wrote this in honor of my grandmother, Ida Rubin z"l. I read this at her funeral in Livingston, NJ February 21, 2011. May her memory be for a blessing and her life be an example. 

Arrows shoot across a playing field
where the rules of the game 
are predetermined
And a sharp smell of grass 
Fills up empty air

no-brain, anti-smart
Palin voters crave selection, 
And the blood of freshly
eliminated dead meat;
Through cross hairs
they set their sights

pretending that standards

and what they have termed merit 

prove the worth

of their spoiled lives,

Rotten hearths,

Carrion brats. 

They who aggrandize themselves
by crafting a carpet
of less worthy, mostly brown, pelts
they lash out at us,
We who hold fast to the strength
they want so badly to pretend they own

They are babies gulping formula
For the vitamins their small bodies
Can’t produce by themselves

Calls for civil dialogue

and an end to divisiveness (rhymes with permissiveness)

in the face of this preening brutality

are calls to leech our power

But we know anger
is a rope
a sinew that binds and hoists 

it may be unladylike
but it is bounty
and the anger inside us is deep
it keeps oppression from assimilating
and keeps rules from fashioning 
us into good girls
with glottal stopped voices
choking syllables downward

I say get angry
Don’t hold back
Don’t stay calm
about the things that matter
Shake the foundations
Upon which they have built
a fragile house of matchsticks
in a tinderbox city of a thousand sparks.