Free Verse
Veteran
My downstairs
neighbor ceded an eye
for the State. Each month he gets a check.
Lately, his wife's been asking for whiskey,
then telling stories. He's not pleased.
After a scotch on the rocks, 1948
loses its glory, becomes a maze of sad mistakes.
She says his glass eye hurts
so he stays in bed all day
but can't sleep.
Blood pressure surges
to shrapnel locked in his head–
black seeds that make
rooms explode.
He tries to digest what crashed then,
each scrap remembered
half through bloodshot
half through glass.
Grandma
I leapt over
mother
to dwell in you: smudged apron,
lonely old Jew, playing gin rummy
with a nine-year-old girl on Saturday nights.
We made a couple: I knew the language,
you read time; I kissed the boys,
you watched from behind twisted
columns in the dining room
like a witch. Later we played Fish 'till
I won and forgot we were the only
ones home, left behind with
the panicked fish in their bowl.
Today, my arms flap like blintzes,
my corns hurt (Storm coming). I sit at windows
and watch. Your Atlantic crossing
I uncrossed to dwell in our roots.
Grandma, wait for me at the screen door
in your blue apron and the smell of
stuffed peppers. I'll bring curlers and your quilt
stitched with those purple ducks
tattered, yet still trying
to break out of the frame.
House Call
On the first day
of National Brotherhood Week
1951, the rabbi came to the house
to say
Your baby brother died.
It was quote a great time
to think of helping men toward
a firmer bond of brotherhood.
unquote
Snow melted from the rabbi's galoshes
into the carpet. His wool scarf
and fur hat lifted like dead
weight to expose a bald head.
Above the sofa
where He sat hung an Iowa farm
so a halo of corn hair
sprung from His head.
When He said Your baby brother
died, I believed.
God would not lie
on a house call.
He holds my hands. His hands—
Ivory Snow. I keep
these divine hands in mine,
but He has things
to do.
Repeat after me
He says and chants
Psalm 23.
Oil drips
from somebody's head.
He rises, puts
on His black boots
black scarf and hat
says Good-bye.
Daddy says Stop!
when I start to cry.
My thumb
stuck
in the valley of the shadow
of death forever.
Next day
Grandma moved in.
We never visited my brother's
grave because there wasn't
which was OK considering
the weather.
Berkowitz-Kumin did the cremation
but it doesn’t matter when you’re five
years seven months and
thirteen days old.
Due to advances in the 1940's and '50's
ours was a model American home: The maid mangled.
TV silenced the living room. Nylons
covered Mommy’s legs. (We wore
Mother/Daughter Dresses
so no one
could tell us
apart.)
Daddy bowled. Mommy became Pres.
of the PTA. We celebrated
Fourth of July and one Thanksgiving
before the pie
a new brother
sang “God
Bless
America.”
It takes sixty years
to grasp
who died that day.
Among the dead one stood
in the kitchen
when America marked quote
February!...
the month filled with great dates
and names…the month of which we hear the praises
sung to George and Abe and Tom;
to the four chaplains who chanted prayers
in different tongues
as they plunged beneath the waves
on the fighting Dorchester…
unquote
Her apron froze
at the stainless sink,
hands reaching only
for soap.
Oh, she could say
Pass the butter, please
but when in 1963
she finally cried
(not for the vegetable
boy
buried inside
me)
but the green felt
feathered hat
consumed by flames
at the neighborhood beauty shop.
Write In Israel is the
website of writer, teacher and mentor Judy Labensohn.
About Judy
Lebensohn, IL
Judy Lebensohn,
born in the United States, has lived in Israel since 1966.
Her poems appeared in Generation (U. of Michigan),
Analecta, Response, Pudding, Shdemot, Conservative
Judaism, Forum, Arc, More of Our Lives, and All of Our Lives.
“Applelore” was anthologized in a college reader called
Headway: A Thematic Reader in 1970, unbeknownst to me
until a friend in Detroit who teaches English sent me a copy. It
appears on the same page with Thomas Merton and Robert Herrick.
My claim to fame.
Read a full
interview with Helen Bar-Lev:
Judy Lebensohn Interview
This is Judy
Lebensohn's first appearance in Sketchbook.
