Jerusalem (after Halevi)
Beautiful heights, city of a great King,
From the western coast my desire burns towards thee.
Pity and tenderness burst in me, remembering
Thy former glories, thy temple now broken stones.
I wish I could fly to thee on the wings of an eagle
And mingle my tears with thy dust.
I have sought thee, love, though the King is not there
And instead of Gilead’s balm, snakes and scorpions.
Let me fall on thy broken stones and tenderly kiss them—
The taste of thy dust will be sweeter than honey to me.
– Robert Mezey (b. 1935)
Dancing Toward the Promised Land
I, Miriam, took my tambourine
and finger cymbals with me
out of the land of slavery
with its daily insults and petty
exemptions, and so remain always
ready to dance on the long, long journey,
dance at every victory, beginning with
surviving the Passover, then the strange
occurrence when the Red Sea dried beneath
our feet as we ran, safely passing over the narrow
strip onto the Sinai Peninsula, all the way out
from the land of longing toward the storied memory of Home.
I danced to the song that spilled out of me,
loud up to Heaven, rejoicing on hopeful feet,
rejoicing with arms flying through warm air like wings.
God knows it may take a long time to return.
It’s been five hundred years, after all.
A long time gone, but our stories keep it alive
in our hearts. I wonder if I’ll live to see it from
the mountains across River Jordan. I wonder
if I’ll be an old woman, and dance down
the side of Mt. Nebo with arms wide open,
heart fluttering strong, leading the way
with cymbals and songs into the Promised Land.
This poem is in the unpublished book, My Blessed Misfortunes, by Alla Renée Bozarth,
Copyright 2011. All rights reserved.
Letter to Marianne Moore
(in tribute to Joseph Grucci)
Come quickly to your city.
All the boats at the piers
are quiet, waiting for you.
Only their flags and pennants move
and those gently as tongues whispering
you down from the sky.
The horns and whistles all are silent,
so that you can hear our softer call.
The Staten Island Ferry leaves no wake.
All the waters are still
mirrors waiting for your face.
If another looks, they erase
with quick ripples and regret.
The bridges are bowed,
waiting, and the tunnels call.
The gargoyles hold their stern faces,
but like children waiting to open
presents, threaten to smile.
The lions at the library, one can see
in peripheral vision, twitch their tails,
eager to follow you down the street.
We have promised them your coming
to quiet them.
Everyone knows that there are brown butter-
flies in your hair, and agates
and small mirrors in your purse
and words.
Come quickly to your city.
– Eugene McCarthy (1916-2005)
Mother
I wish that I could talk with her again.
That’s what I thought of when I thought of home,
Always supposing I had a home to come to.
If she were here, we’d warm the Chinese pot
To brew a jasmine-scented elixir,
And I would tell her how my life has been—
All the parts that don’t make sense to me,
And she would let me talk until the parts
Fitted together.
That will never be.
She couldn’t wait for me to come to her—
Ten years away. I couldn’t wish for her
To wait, all blind and helpless as she was.
So now I have come home to emptiness:
No silly welcome-rhyme, no happy tears,
No eager questioning. No way to get
An answer to my questions. Silence fills
The rooms that once were vibrant with her song,
And all the things I wanted to talk out
With her are locked forever in my heart.
I wander through the rooms where she is not.
Alone I sit on the hassock by her chair,
And there, at last, I seem to hear her voice:
“You’re a big girl now. You can work things out.”
– Bea Exner Liu (1907-1997)
Voyager Dust
When they arrive in the new country,
voyagers carry it on their shoulders,
the dusting of the sky they left behind.
The woman on the bus in the downy sweater,
I could smell it in her clothes.
It was voyager’s dust from China.
It lay in the foreign stitching of her placket.
It said: We will meet again in Beijing,
in Guangzhou. We will meet again.
My mother had voyager’s dust in her scarves.
I imagine her a new student like this woman on the bus,
getting home, shaking out the clothes from her suitcase,
hanging up, one by one, the garments from the old country.
On washing day my mother would unroll her scarves.
She’d hold one end, my brother or I the other,
and we’d stretch the wet georgette and shake it out.
We’d dash, my brother or I, under the canopy,
its soft spray on our faces like the ash
of debris after the destruction of a city,
its citizen driven out across the earth.
We never knew
it was voyager dust. It said:
We will meet again in Damascus,
in Aleppo. We will meet again.
It was Syria in her scarves.
We never knew it.
Now it is on our shoulders too.
– Mohja Kahf (b. 1967)
Physician, poet and philosopher Judah Halevi was born in Spain, in 1075 or 1086, and died in 1141 shortly after arriving in the Holy Land. He is considered one of the greatest Hebrew poets, celebrated both for his religious and his secular works, many of which appear in present-day Jewish liturgy. American poet and academic Robert Mezey is also a noted translator. He was born in Philadelphia and attended Kenyon College, the University of Iowa, and Stanford University. He has held various teaching positions and retired in 1999 after 23 years at Pomona College. He currently resides in Maryland.
Bea Exner Liu was born and raised in Northfield, Minnesota, and graduated from Carleton College. She moved to China in 1935 to teach English, since teaching positions were scarce in the United States during the Depression. While there, she married a Chinese classmate from Carleton, and witnessed the Japanese invasion of China during the years 1935 to 1945. The eventuality of a Communist takeover finally brought Liu and her family back to Minnesota. I found her poem in an anthology titled Looking for Home: Women Writing about Exile.
Mohja Kahf is a Syrian-American poet, novelist, and professor. In 1971, Kahf and her family moved to the United States. She grew up in a devout Muslim household. She graduated from Douglass College in 1988, and later received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Rutgers. Since 1995, she has taught at the University of Arkansas. I was intrigued by the possibility of evoking places as far away as Beijing, Guangzhou, Damascus and Aleppo with musical gestures, and by the opportunity to write a musical scene of childhood play – running under the canopy of wet scarves.
Eugene McCarthy (1916-2005) was an American politician, poet, and long-time Congressman from Minnesota. He served in the United States House of Representatives from 1949 to 1959, and the United States Senate from 1959 to 1971. He took up writing poetry in the 1960s, and his growing political prominence led to increased interest in his published works. "If any of you are secret poets, the best way to break into print is to run for the presidency", he wrote in 1968.
Poet and prose writer Alla Reneé Bozarth was among the first eleven women ordained as Episcopal priests in 1974 in Philadelphia. She has over forty years of professional experience as a soul caregiver—soul-mending as a psychotherapist and soul-tending as a spiritual director.
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