I started taking my writing seriously by taking poetry seriously, spending time in workshops and reading collections. I never published any poems. I never felt they were strong enough to submit, but I wrote them, including two that feel pressing today. One was my response to the Squirrel Hill shootings at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA, which robbed us of 11 mostly elderly Jews. Today is the 5th anniversary of that terrible shooting. The other is a poem about giving up Zionism, the creeping sense of dread that led to it, and the exuberant freedom I found on the other side of that toxic political ideology. I share them both here now.
Squirrel Hill
Awkwardly
meet me at the fringes of our prayer shawls
Lightly grazing each other’s lives
Shuffling to stand
In carefully prescribed distances from each other
Neighbor and Brother
You bow, then I bow
So it looks like I know when to bow
Anxieties of a Jewish poet
Do I say ציתצית?
“Fringes of our prayer shawls” is lovely, tender, liminal
But a translation
Why should I translate myself for them?
What did they ever translate for me?
A pillar of the community holds up what, exactly?
When it falls, what comes crashing down with it?
Liver-spotted hands shake mine
Shkoyach!
Liver-spotted hands tremblingly spread schmear on a bagel
I say, “I dreamt of world without Jews. I couldn’t tell you what was different, but there was no point to anything anymore.”
You say, “We will replace our enemies”
I say, “The first law of the world is fear and so the second is kindness.”
You say, “The nature of the book is to humble, but humility is not always wise.”
“A bris is the first, important betrayal, a fundamental admission of weakness from the parents,” I say.
“They are declaring that they can’t save you when God wants you to bleed.”
You say, “You have cream cheese in your beard. Nope, it’s whitefish salad.”
Foolishly, I once recommended the abolition of Kiddush
To spare us all the anxiety
Where would you be then, my Brother? When would I hear from you?
I’ll see you next week.
I Stopped Being A Zionist!
A Poem in 12 tribes that are all Israel. Cut out each sentence and fill the blank with each one, until the filled in blank is a mirror.
I stopped being a Zionist! because ________
From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.
Most Jews break my heart.
I suspect the side that’s quibbling about what precisely IS ethnic cleansing of being up to no good.
Olives taste best without ash.
Zionism got boring real fast, in a sort of insidious way.
Golda Meir called the Mizrahi Black Panthers, a movement for economic and legal parity between European and North African Jews, “not nice boys”
I saw a documentary once which made an earnest argument that Moshe Dayyan is somehow magnanimous for not blowing up the Temple Mount.
I would be a terrible soldier.
We all must break our fathers’ hearts.
There are brothers who sit on opposite sides of a wall, not seeing each other for decades at a time. The brothers love one another. The wall has holes in it but the holes are full of soldiers
I trust Palestinians and other people when they say they don’t want to hurt Jews. I have been wrong before. Still, God only asks for trust from us.
I saw a nasty glint in my friend Benny’s eye one day, and it never went away.
Mordecai Martin, Writer 