ARE WE THERE YET?

Ode to Passover

by Anita S Pulier

Painting by Frans Pourpos the Elder (c. 1565–1580) depicting God showing Moses the Promised Land. Source: Wikipedia.

Celebrate forty years of wandering.
Forty 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 tatoos,
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?

and Gaza
and Gaza

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 newest  books are Paradise Reexamined and Leaving Brooklyn  (Kelsay Books). ). 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 and Cultural Daily.

DATA AIN’T WISDOM

 by Anita S Pulier

Project 538, July 10, 2024

Even a perfect census will not put out the fire
burning in the Nationalist heart.

Nooses, confederate flags,
swastikas

stoke a malicious wind,
tease stray embers ablaze,

decency, fairness torched,
the dead mourned in time

to welcome
the next batch of flatliners,

school children hiding from bullets,
dead folk in synagogues, movies or concerts,

and caravans of the desperate who
wonder how close to an embryo

must one be to claim the right to life?
America, dear,

our once noble experiment
is choking on the foul air

in the autocratic wastebin of
greed and bigotry.

Sure, we will count heads,
tally up racial ancestry,

count votes,
count the dead, but will we learn

why, oh why, are so many
sucking the poison

from the orange beast’s burning breast
while Momma’s milk curdles and dries up?

Anita S Pulier’s chapbooks Perfect Diet, The Lovely Mundane and Sounds of Morning and her books The Butchers Diamond and Toast were published by Finishing Line Press.  Paradise Reexamined came out in 2023 (Kelsay Books). Her new book Leaving Brooklyn is due in Jan '25 from Kelsay Books  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 and Cultural Daily.