My Circle

The world is shrinking. We are all so close, so tightly bound. It seems we could feel the breeze across the world, if we tried hard enough.

Yet for me, the world seems larger than ever before. Every day, new phenomena are born for me. Seeing an arrest; fielding questions on topics I did not know existed. I smell a waking city; my pulse beats with one that will not sleep.

And every night, I sleep a little smaller. Not less- I am the same, but my setting has swollen.

Often, my surroundings take in things I do not like. Hatreds and love irrational; logic and feeling unsound. They crowd me, peck at my moral and intellectual structure, or else they coo and whisper their shadowed allure. It is a dangerous business, growing this world of mine. And defense is often hard to come by.

But every night, before sleep (that wonderful symphony of deepest truth and lies) I fold my arms beneath my pillow. The circle that forms begins at my heart, and stretches, warm and deep, to my head. In my circle, I think of all that I know, all that I believe, and I savor the musky tang of reality. This is real, I think, slipping safe and solid into my circle. This is true.

And even the bright light of day could never outshine my clarity.

The Tortoise Won the Race

I realize that my last post was a bit of a downer, and really rather jarring as a two-month wallpaper for my blog. But let's face it, shall we? College is hard. There is a lot to adjust to. Primarily, there is quite a hefty volume of paper that I now seem to be responsible for. Background readings, short assignments, syllabi, reports, textbooks, midterms (oh my!) It's more than I am accustomed to, and it's taking time to learn how to make a full course meal out of something that was once much-anticipated dessert.

But I'm getting used to it. I have met a number of very lovely people with whom I hope to become closer, and there are many friends from previous years whom I am learning to know even better. I can derive a real and consistent pleasure from at least one of my classes (naturally, this course is a workload heavyweight) and I even dabble in extra-curriculars.

I am going to be fine. I'm going to get to the end of this race. Slowly, steadily... Happily.

Passing for Future

Out front, through and away from the building with the sleek revolving-door. I am walking in Manhattan, clutching a tall, hot paper cup, striding with purse and plastic bag swinging. I am waiting for the light, crossing Lexington, moving toward other avenues with famous, impressive addresses. Alone, independent.

But the liquid in my cup is one-fourth milk, and steeped with five packages of plastic sugar. It's still bitter. To bitter for me, accustomed to sweet.

And the plastic bag holds two sandwiches in plastic triangles, that I juggled around the crowded college cafe before I succumbed to the dread of eating alone, again.

My purse is a tangle of easy-reach cords and technical gadgets designed to make life easy, simple. Somewhere within is buried my accursed ID card, which I must show to my doorman to enter the building. (I don't wear it on my neck. I don't want to look stupid.) After twenty seconds of awkward, one-handed searching, I produce my empty plastic card case to which my key is attached. This, presented on a platter of an innocent, bashful smile, finally reward me entrance.

I sigh to my brightly dismal dorm. I hope this isn't really college.

Even my room pretends to be something it isn't.

Media

What I say means little
I have often found.
My "no"s and "yes"s disappear
In oceans of opinionioned sound.

And what a sight! That sea.
A vision that they cannot see,

For in the time that one would need
to land an island in the greed

The sea would take its due
And look!
Poor see-man,
He has drowned.

---
Hello, everyone. I am back from my wonderful year in Israel, happy, slightly writers blocked and at a loss how to express my anguish and frustration for this latest episode in Israel and the Jewish People's perennial struggle for existence.

(That's where this poem came from.)

Please tell me- how are you?

Future

If I

forget you

may I lose

my right

hand
.

On Being Stared At

I stand slowly and move toward the wall. Hoping, willing, that the direction I'm facing is east. Praying prematurely that G-d will make me invisible.

Three steps backwards. Tight, furtive steps, and then I move forward. Three steps. Focus...

But they're looking at me. I can feel it as I stand, as I bow incrementally, as I strike my chest so softly. Their eyes are like spotlights, like dull lumps in an old mattress. Innocuous, but unrelenting; I squirm, but I cannot escape them. I'm from New York; I'm not used to such scrutiny!

I tried to find a quiet place, a subtle cranny where I could pray in privacy. I looked, and looked, but such a place does not seem to exist in Disneyworld. This small pavilion was the best available, and it would suffice, if not for the family behind me. They sit, and eat their ice cream, and gaze in fascinated bewilderment at this vision in front of them.

If you want to know, ASK!!

So I pray. What else can I do? They are still on my mind, but I push them to the rim; for the moment, I've stopped them from swimming in my thoughts.

Three steps backward. I ask for peace as I bow again. Forward now...

At the end, I smile at my mother, sitting at a table with my sister. "Ready to go?" she asks. She knows- I nod, and we leave.

But on our way out, I hesitate, and direct closed smile to my silent peanut gallery. Why? Why not? I can't approach them, walk up and demand an explanation for their careful, ignorant study. At least I can show them... something. Prove I know they were staring, that... that I'm a person, too.

So I spread on my grimace-hybrid, and the father grins back at me, an arc of something that looks rather like sympathy.

He thinks I'm crazy.

I am frozen.

There's nothing you can do. Be dignified.

And so I walk away, with the sounds of the park and my pulse thundering in my ears. Shocked, but oddly gratified. The reality of my good fortune crystallized again for me, for a moment. The goodness I am given; the greatness of my difference.

But find a better place tomorrow, please.

Many Colored Mirrors

What is Israel?

Is it that place on the news, that Iz-reel country torn by war and scattered with brown, screaming faces? That place everyone brings up when they want to seem sophisticated, where all those strong-men in green (you know, with the big guns), are all over, glaring and beating up women right there on your TV screen?

Sounds like an ugly country.

Or is it a location of historical interest- that place where and myth and moral and blind belief blur so black that even logic struggles to pierce the morass? So much of society roots itself there- how fascinating for you! Even a walk in the streets is a history lesson. See here, the remainders of Roman architecture- over there, the Crusaders' battleground. So much to see, and photograph, and place in albums, and forget... wonderful.

Or rather dull. I think, anyway.

Well then, maybe for you Israel is modern. A thriving state of metropolis and shopping malls, of neon lights and stereos and crashing trains. People are rich, people are rude, people are pretty, people live! Just like anywhere else, right? Different language, of course, but hey- even the street signs are written in English. Oh right, they have that army thing. Great souvenirs, much better than Greece.

Bewildering.

So maybe it's the religious place. That place you want, mostly, and people want for you. And maybe you don't know why you want it, or what it is, or why you are really going there. And, maybe, it's not even something you feel- not when you land in Ben-Gurion, or when you walk around Haifa, or meet your first taxi driver.

And maybe you'll feel it at the Wall- maybe not. Maybe Tzfat will reach you, or at the foot of a mountain in the Negev. But maybe not.

But you'll feel it some time. So is that what Israel is for you?

Maybe. Anyway, it's a lot closer.

Never a Dull Moment... Yet

I'm afraid I've gotten used to being busy. I am decidedly ill equipped to cope with this difficulty.

You see, I've just spent approximately nine months steeped in a Cuisinart marinade composed primarily of study and haste. When I was not in class, I was going to class, or else I was leaving class and rushing to a meal. Baring this, I was hurrying to a supermarket, or trying to make it to the Kotel with daylight left, or rushing to catch the last precious minutes of hot water supplied to our dorm.

It was hard and fantastic, and more consuming than anything I had done before. Therefore now that I have returned to my lovely, comfortable abode, in which there is always hot water, and there is always food, and there nothing to do, I find myself in a quandary of boredom which appears entirely unfamiliar to me. Do to this (I suspect? I hope??) I am also sustaining a decided lack of literary inspiration.

Well. Life will pick up.

It always does.

Life as I Know It

Dear World;

You have changed over the past year. Changed rather a lot.

I know you might disagree- "So I'm a little older," you might protest. "Does that mean I'm any different?"

Yes, my dear world, you are different. You are a little bit smaller from the last time I really looked at you. (Are you appeased?) You are also more transparent, and somehow infinitely more colorful. Most of your lines are sharper, though many seemed to have blurred beyond scrutiny. You are more cruel than I can comprehend; you are sweeter than I can imagine.

Dear World, change is frightening, I know. That moment when you gaze into your mirror of cosmos, when you turn back the pages of the diary written in stars, and you do not recognize yourself... Is there a greater pain or terror in existence?

But look close, my friend- Read between your careful lines. Oh, how you have grown! Pure, living reality has sprung from rote facsimile. You have learned to breathe on your own, to take your careful steps around the Universe all on your own. You can see for yourself, for now you can truly see.

The World that was was wonderful. The World that is is real.

And there is ever work to be done.

The Prayer

"Yaldah," they said

"Ah yaldah, a shekel!"

Their hands, soft and old

As they grope for my coins.

 

She asks me for twenty

A bill, in exchange

My wallet is open and

then

 

"Yaldah!"

"Yaldah!" 

How many?

How many?

The coins clicking

dubious

and cool

in my palm.

 

Another face,

Another bag,

They thank me

the recievers...

"Chassunah! Marry!"

They bless me

again.

 

"Slicha," 

I whisper,

My voice stunned

to silence.

"Ratzah l'hitpallel..."

I guesture at the Wall.

 

The hands leave mine

they are gone

when I leave.

What Stays With You

Someone in front of me rifles through a rattling plastic package. "Oh!" she says, thick annoyance souring her voice, "We're out of the cherry flavor."

So spoiled?

Pulling on a thick sweater (it's seventy one degrees!) but I'm still cold.

So selfish?

Eating, cake and fruit, snacking in frustration. "There's nothing here to eat", I say.

So pampered! Don't you know, don't you know how many those crumbs would feed??

And standing in the train station, packed in the crush of traffic, so uncomfortable. But there is space to breathe, I think. And they could push us tighter, and harder, until my legs are lifted off the ground, and I can't move, not at ALL, and I'm so, so scared, because I don't want to die...

But the crowd moves on, beacuse we are not in a gas chamber. And I must move on as well, wading through these modern luxuries, trying to preserve my new sensitivity while never forgetting to live.

Breathing in Majdanek

The black sign smiles down from the black building, friendly and benign. The letters are white and curvaceous, winking sweetly at us, as we pass beneath it's hungry, seductive gaze.

The sign reads "Bad und Desinfektion I."

Bath and disinfection. We file inside.

Numbly, I wonder how I have come here, how I am so arrogant as to think I could survive where hundreds of thousands of my sisters and brothers have perished. We walk slowly through chambers designed to quiet the condemned, watching our surroundings and drinking them in as if these were to be our last living sights as well. The entranceway, where our hair would have been cut. The bath room, where rusty showers suspend like a sprinkler system from the cement ceiling. We walk in the footsteps of so many, and I feel their quiet eyes upon us as our shod feet fall where their bare soles had shuffled. I swallow, and whisper Tehillim, and pray we do not disturb their rest.

In the last room, the gas chamber, the stench of chemicals pervades. The walls are streaked and stained with green residue, which clings to the cement like some morbid facsimile of living moss. Fingernail scratches scar the confines, following final moments scrabbling for life as the vices of death took hold. The scars grow fainter as they draw closer to the floor.

I begin to shudder as my mind struggles to encompass my surroundings. Tears swell my vision, and my very being is racked with a silent hacking I realize are sobs. The screams of the past echo around me, billowing in a deafening final protest. My feet stand on a wooden pathway raised above the floor. Step down, some terrible force commands me. Stand where they stood, die where they died. Step down! Not for several minutes can I bare to leave the "comfort" of my pathway, but I do. I step down, and join my sisters, for the few moments my sanity can sustain it.

Reality is thin in the gas chamber. There is a sense, somehow, of both terrible pressure and a vast, inescapable emptiness. The fabric of the world is frayed and weak, there where so many souls were choked from their bodies. Time is slower, and existence seems to float, very gently, in the currents of Eternity like some ancient cobweb. I continue to tremble as we mouth the Shema together, and as we leave the chamber of death. Alive, I wonder, as we shuffle out. A miracle. You do not walk out of a gas chamber.

I breathe deeply as we stand finally outside, reveling as the cold April air enters my lungs. I breathe as if I am breathing for the first time.

Perhaps I am.

Gift of Life

If I could count each flake of ash
If I could breathe for every soul
If I could cry for every tear
How long until I fill the hole?

The hole undug for every grave
The lives unlived, the days unsaved
The freedom snatched from every slave...
The payment for the gift they gave.

But though in their valley of death I do walk
Lo irah rah, ki Atah imadi,
Peace for the dove, and blood for the hawk;
From the nights in the fires
Are reborn the free.

Not in Kansas Anymore

"BADATZ! BADATZ!!" The cry frantic as a plea for life. Crush of voices and feet and plastic bags, hemmers and hawkers swirling in the whirlpool's dance. Beggars wedged in sunken lives, bleating pleas for... their hands asking for money, their eyes begging for... other things. Light leaking sullen through the canvas tarp, not bothering to illuminate. Rain pecking and preying on the feeble and the frantic, fraying patience like thread. Poultry flesh, meat and fish lie strewn about their butcher's stands, their ripe sour reek seeping into living skin, into hair and cloth and vision, mingling with the rain and the rats. Then sweetness like Eden, sweetness of nuts melting in their shells, of dazzling fruit swathed in sugar, of pita so fresh it evaporates in your mouth. And light, not from above but from mountains of tomatoes glowing faintly through the dim, and from the shimmering heat rising from immaculate lines of sticky cakes. And the noise folding over it all, wreathing the scene... the screams of the vendors, chatter of coins, crackle of packaging, slither of a thousand feet on dewy concrete. The barks from haggling passerby, crunch of vegetables pulled from vines, flapping of breathing produce, the buzz of Hebrew and Yiddish and English and Arabic and French and Japanese, all sucked and twined into one bellowing, seething mass of staccato communication swelling like a wave brought up from the ocean depths, and crashing so as to eradicate thought-

 

 

"So that's the shuk."

 

"Yup."

Reflections on the Negev

There are... mountains all around me. I think.. I don't know. Are they mountains, these mind-stunning epiphanies? I feel as if my chest has been crushed by a war hammer. Massive spasms of purest rock, straining, stretching up from mystery... Red and purple, blue- green! Have you ever seen green rock? Have you ever been swallowed by a crater, left hoarse and gasping by frozen waves of beauty so enormous as to stifle thought? I raise my eyes to the mountains, is all I can think of. I shield my eyes from the heat of it, even though my back is to the sun. Did the king, as he wrote his words? Did he see himself from afar, a passing speck all-encompassed by Limitless Sight? From where will come my salvation? Is this is my salvation? A redemption witnessed by that which to me is infinite, is incomprehensible... My salvation will come from G-D, the Maker of the heavens and earth.

 

I breathe again.

A Life Is Not Of Questions Asked

Boy, time flies, time flies...
she says.
I think,
Again? I know.
Or thought I knew, more like.

Brooklyn accents spoken thick
Like cream cheese, on a sesame bagel.
Good times, right?
The best, but always over
even before I blink.

Relic stories, drifting
In my hazy mind, so foolish.
Of a bridesmaid- believe it, now she's fifty
And friends who remember when my mother was born.

It seems that things should disappear
Instead of thoughts, in the end.
Unfair, I think,
I'd rather have the memories.
Which weighs more, the thirtieth day
Or two hundred magnets?
Or watches, all from Swatch, of course
But why?

Why- the answers
I never know
Those that she knew, I think.
But she never asked the question.
Only just went through the alphabet
the letters of love,
With never a why
Like letters she got in the mail- and sent!
Our only honest pen-pal.

I love to hear from you,
I know.
(I should call more often)
Too busy, though.
And how is school?
It's good,
I'm safe
Like Jackie Robinson.
And by tomorrow...
I'll be a genius.

I love you...
too...
Again...
I'll call...
I'll try
I know...
I try
She never asked.

_____

In memory of my Grandmother.