Passover 2022
by Anita S. Pulier
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| Marc Chagall's "Passover Haggadah" |
Celebrate forty years of wandering.
40 years of searching.
Read Haggadah to the children,
give thanks,
sing praises
for the tribe surviving.
Focus on the ancients,
not the news.
Ignore ICE, as it issues
this warning: if officers
view you as Other,
hear a foreign accent,
take notice of shabby clothes,
you will be wrangled
like cattle into pens
and, paperless or not, deported.
To where? Weep, explain
you have lived here
since you were two,
this is your home.
Your wife, your children,
your aged mother
may never see you again.
Glory be to what?
Listen! Angry screams nurtured
by hatred, drown out the cries
of kids in Florida, or Texas, or next door.
How many more will be force fed this poison
in the name of a merciless God
punishing the sin of survival?
Tonight, we Jews co-opt words;
suffering, pain, freedom.
I imagine the day that
anyone’s God
will deliver enlightenment,
angels will sing,
heavenly light will shine
on the cruel irony of the self-righteous,
the day each of us will be revealed
as the supplicant,
each of us the Other.
The day our ancient journey,
our Passover celebration,
will not fall so woefully short
of the promised land.
Anita S. Pulier’s chapbooks Perfect Diet, The Lovely Mundane, and Sounds of Morning and her books The Butcher's Diamond and Toast were published by Finishing Line Press. Anita’s poems have appeared in many journals and her work is included in nine print anthologies. Anita has been a featured poet on The Writer's Almanac.