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.
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.