Three Poems: Inheritance, Matriarchs, Devotion

Inheritance

My grandparents spoke Yiddish,

language of fleedom.

Its sperm-shaped letters

swam through my DNA.

.

.

For nine months I ran

from cossack marauders

gestapo

the kgb.

.

By the time I spoke,

bubbie and zaydie broke enough English

to be an embarrassment.

I cut the cord.

.

By the time I understood,

bubbie and zaydie were dead.

I chant guilt in Aramaic.

.

Matriarchs

It is still

night.

.

For the first time since his bar mitzvah,

he descends the cracked concrete steps,

the acrid scent unchanged these forty-two years.

Men turn from their black leather straps, nod.

As he lifts a blue and white tallis from the wicker basket,

memory unlocks the ancient formula:

Baruch ata Adonai…

.

The rabbi begins to chant in Hebrew

but he is a little boy, tucked in the corner

of bubbie’s overheated Brooklyn apartment.

Mama is spieling a bawdy joke in Yiddish.

Her crimson lips pause to suck on a Chesterfield,

the punch line exhaled in an Arpege-scented cloud.

.

“Rise for Tefilah.”

He blinks himself into the present,

stares down at his torn shirt pocket.

He blinks faster,

knowing he cannot stop the flow.

Abraham~~Isaac~~Jacob

Sarah~~Rebecca~~

Mama, he wails.

.

Generations of seamstresses materialize

to hem the edges of his frayed pocket.

Each stitch a mother

come to mend.

.

Devotion

ten little blue stems at sunset

the minyan stands tall

bends in unison

wispy heads bob to earth

then sky

then earth again

whiskers quivering

East