The poems in this post are part of a special section, curated by Ori Z Soltes and Robert Bettmann, The Jewish Experience.

Spinoza
Alone, he works, grinding lenses. The dust,
     which he coughs up, symptom

of the early death to come, settles
     on the table, floor, his hands. Dust coats

his eyebrows, though he may not notice
     or care. Momentarily, as he sets down a lens,

he releases his thinking, as if thinking
     is the lens. There is so much quiet

in Voorburg, and this sabbath
     from thinking is rare, for thought is everything,

rationality is everything. God is rationality,
     its very source, extending into

everything. The world, therefore,
     is rational, we’d know, if only we thought about it

clearly enough. Outside, snowflakes
     drift, windblown, spinning,

each one rational, like God, so much God
     today falling in silence, looking like dust.

Elizabeth Poliner’s books include the poetry collection, What You Know in Your Hands (David Robert Books), a Beltway Poetry Quarterly Best Book selection for 2015, and the novel, As Close to Us as Breathing (Little, Brown & Co.), winner of the 2017 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in Fiction and finalist for the Ribalow Prize for Jewish fiction. A new novel, Spinning at the Edges, is forthcoming from HarperCollins. Her poetry has appeared in The Sun, The Southern Review, The Hopkins Review, Ilanot Review, Vita Poetica, and many other journals.

Featured image in this post: Canal at Voorburg, Holland by Charles Paul Gruppé, Charles Paul Gruppé, creative commons via wikimedia commons.