A PLAN FOR ROSH HASHANAH

by Anita Pulier

New Year’s greetings

line up in my in-box

alongside desperate pleas.

I skip past

Unicef

NOW

Planned Parenthood

J Street

The ACLU

The DNC

Bernie and Elizabeth

Earthquake and hurricane relief

and Gaza, and Gaza.

open only

holiday greetings,

an invitation to cast off sin

at the beach with kith and kin.

Yet the weeping world is insistent,

oozes through cyberspace and

drowns out the trumpeting shofar.

There I am, stranded, sandwiched

between the seasonal rituals of an ancient

holiday and others’ jarring pain.

I nod to the god

I do not believe in,

propose a deal:

keep everyone I love safe and

I will grapple with despair and failure tomorrow.

Today I will nurture joy and unfounded optimism,

eat apples and honey,

celebrate the tribe.

Anita Pulier's latest book is Leaving Brooklyn. (Kelsay Books) Anita’s poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She has been a featured poet on The Writer's Almanac and Cultural Daily. 

WITNESS

 by Amy Shimshon-Santo

I am the person formerly known as _____ _____ - _____.

Now she is the bird left behind from the flock.

She is the figure weeping in the sand.

A witness, witnessed only by the sea.

I am not a war correspondent or a social media expert. 

I am not a documentarian of suffering.

Don’t worry. I have nothing to teach you and nothing to say. 

I’m just skipping words like stones along the water, 

knowing they will bounce and then sink down.

The birds laugh at us.

Birds side eye sonic jets and helicopters. 

Maybe they will tell the trees what’s going on — what they see and feel.

Last week I was a writer.

Today I am a barnacle on the belly of a whale. 

I am moaning like an underwater animal.

When did time stop? When will it start back up? 

Will it? Is this the new time, 

the timeless time, lost in unknowing?

I am not a flag.

I am no longer really a woman, I just gave birth to life.

I am not a faith, just faithful.

Oh broken bones and heavy stones

How far will you tumble?

How far down will you fall?

Six days ago was the sabbath. We gathered 

with 29 members of my family across four generations. Cousins with cousins. 

Sisters with sisters. Brothers and children and grandparents.

Six days ago was a Friday.

Today is six days past a moment of miracles, six days past the bomb.

24 hours x 6 ago there was a night where we could all lay down and hope to sleep.

If I am going to sit with the page I have to say that I don’t want to say

I want this to not be true.

Before I speak, I want you to know that I am wrong. 

Not because I know nothing but because everything is wrong. 

Not every thing but the big world of powers that evaporate worlds. 

I don’t want to remind my mind and relive what has become a beginning.

I don’t want to state the facts because the facts are a mush of kindnesses and disasters.

I am the person formerly known as a self.

I melted into the Mediterranean, sonic booms above our heads. 

My tears salt the water and make everything sting.

I want to tell you about the weeping. 

The mother collapsing onto her belly like a conch shell whose life has departed. 

She is the throw away, the detritus of those left behind.

Author’s note: I have been in three cities in Israel during this past week. I am from Los Angeles. My mother was born here in 1932 as a Jewish person under the British Mandate Palestine. I am a mother, a teacher, and a culture maker. I am deeply opposed to murder, torture, war, and intergenerational harm. War is the loss of lives and infrastructure and dreams and time. Torture and war are the worst uses of human energy and potential.

A POEM FOR UKRAINE

by David James

“Writing My Heart Out,” a painting by Gladiola Sotomayor.

I want to write a poem that will lick

 

your heart clean,

that will make you forget every nightmare,

 

every cut and scrape, every syllable of bad news you’ve ever heard,

a poem that will close your eyes and let you dream

 

of another life, perfect in its arc, where

all things, dead or alive, bow to your smile,

 

all clouds move to your breath, birds and desires and wishes

land on your forearm when you call them.

 

I want to write a poem to send all sadness into exile,

to fit all pain and despair onto one gaudy blue dish

 

that you can toss outside and ignore,

a poem so quiet you never hear it

 

come into your life, sit on your couch, sleep in your bed,

never hear its small footsteps on the floor.

This poem, which must be written under a moonlit

sky with eleven stars and one dog barking in town,

 

will end the world as we know it. No more death

or hunger or war. No more aging or sickness or weeping.

 

No more walking with your feet on the ground.

David James’ most recent book is Alive in Your Skin While You Still Own It.

IF

by Jasmine Kitses

Photo by RYAN REMIORZ/THE CANADIAN PRESS via The Globe and Mail (Canada)

If taking a nap means
                                    weeping
if the whole sky
            lets go of its corners
if you feel empty
        for no reason
full
                                for no reason—


if we could
let ourselves
be riveted
to this          
very moment


Jasmine Kitses is a poet from San Francisco.

THE LULLABIES FALL SILENT

by Janet Leahy

'Trump administration officials have been sending babies and other young children forcibly separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border to at least three “tender age” shelters in South Texas, The Associated Press has learned. Lawyers and medical providers who have visited the Rio Grande Valley shelters described play rooms of crying preschool-age children in crisis.' —The Guardian, June 20, 2018

In the detention center
there are no lullabies for the eight-month-old infant,
for the two-year-old  girl, for the young boy
calling out for his Papa, his Mama,
for the child who has memorized
his auntie’s phone number, and pleads
to call her, so she can come and take him home.
No one sings behind the chain-link fence,   
no one reads “Good Night Moon,”
or hugs a child as darkness settles,
but in detention, darkness never settles,
lights stay on all night . . .
No one cradles a crying infant.
No one recites “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”
still they wonder where . . . the lost parents are.
There are no groups singing rounds
of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,”
children remember crossing the Rio Grande
in a boat too crowded, too cold, too wet.
No one intones “Are You Sleeping, Are You Sleeping”
because all one can hear is children weeping.
No one sings “Hush Little Baby,” yet little babies
do not hush, without a mother or father near.
All the while the king is in his counting house
counting out his money, the queen is in the parlour
eating bread and honey.
And the lullabies
fall silent.



Janet Leahy is a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. Her ekphrastic poems have appeared in several art exhibits throughout the state. Her work has been published in the Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar, Midwest Prairie Review, in many anthologies, literary journals and online at My Daily Poem, TheNewVerse.News, and Blue Heron. She has published two collections of poetry. She enjoys working with a host of poets in the  Milwaukee-Waukesha area.