Two Poems by Diane Gottlieb

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

Day 332

She called him sweet boy
at his funeral.

Cried it’s mama
at the Gaza border

days before. Did her words
travel tunnels, finally reach him,

pierce his pain?
On the podium

mama stands, shirt
rendered at the neck.

Day 332, black-inked on tape
sticking to her chest.

I’ll have to teach myself
how to feel you in a different way.

Oh, Great Teacher!
What a cruel education

for a woman who only
gives thanks for your gifts.

You hand out
huge burdens,

like cheap stinking candy
rotting teeth, breaking spirits,

crushing souls.
We’re tired, God

of being left
in the desert

drowning
drowning in thirst.

This story, so old.
Yesterday, tomorrow

another and another.
Enough

mamas,
sweet boys,
buried sons.

                                                     ~ For Rachel Goldberg Polin, for all the hostage families. For Hersh.

Sunday School

I’m partial to old tunes, old people—and midrash.*
So much to be gleaned from yellowed notes and rabbis
arguing with rabbis and kabbalists who must turn
forty before studying the Zohar**—or risk breaking
from reality. Mysticism
is real. Real scary. Sometimes
I feel like I’m breaking
though I’ve never studied Zohar and forty
has set sail from my shores many moons ago.
I’ve been thinking lots
about the Torah, rabbis, kabbalists,
about Gaza. Is it possible to have a conversation today
about Gaza? There are no conversations today
about Gaza. Just LOUD voices telling me how I need to feel
about Gaza, students—and writers, who should know better—
who know everything about everything
except which river or sea—or history. I need an old rabbi
in black robes and a fur hat and a kabbalist
who reads scripture from a matriarch’s point of view.
Call me crazy, call me Zionist—
but I need a little midrash here. I need help
because the Torah, Zohar, Gaza,
make my head spin. On one hand, Abraham pleads
with God to spare the whole of Sodom and Gomorrah
if He finds ten righteous souls. On the other, Moses sings
let my people go. When Pharaoh gives chase, Moses says
fuck it—or something like that—and parts the sea.
It’s the Red Sea btw—
which God later closes
on the chasing Egyptians. Egyptians btw—
won’t let Gazans cross their borders
and no one’s telling them how to feel. But
that’s a side note. Who wants to get bogged down
with details, wade in the weeds, take time to ask questions
when it’s so much easier to be right—
and scream. I’d rather sing.
There’s an old song by The Clash—
you know the one. I used to think it was about love,
but now I think it may be midrash.
It asks a question, its chorus is a question,
the whole friggin song is a question, a question
that feels like survival: should I stay or should I go?
A question as old as Genesis.
A question for Abraham and Moses,
for Israel in Gaza. Oh, how
the world is happiest
when Jews are on their knees!
It’s all in the lighting. Where we shine it
and what we keep in the shadows.
History. It’s an old song. Rabbis. Pray
tell. How to get people paying attention
to history’s lyrics? To study before they’re forty?
I’ve got one, just one sentence midrash:
if we don’t look back, we’ll all turn to salt.

*midrash is the practice of commenting on the Torah—in prose, poetry, visual art
**Zohar is a collection of ancient Jewish mystical texts. It used to be that one was prohibited from studying these texts before one reached the age of 40, as their power could make a younger person go insane or even result in death.

Diane Gottlieb is the editor of Awakenings: Stories of Body & Consciousness (ELJ Editions) and the Prose/CNF editor of Emerge Literary Journal. Her writing appears in Brevity, Witness, Colorado Review, River Teeth, Florida Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, 2023 Best Microfiction, Identity Theory, The Rumpus, and many other lovely places. She is the winner of Tiferet Journal’s 2021 Writing Contest in nonfiction, a finalist in Smokelong’s 2022 Summer Micro Contest, longlisted in 2023 and 2024 at Wigleaf Top 50, a finalist for The Florida Review’s 2023 Editor’s Prize for Creative Nonfiction and a finalist for the 2024 Porch Prize in the nonfiction category. Find her at https://dianegottlieb.com and @DianeGotAuthor.

Featured image in this post: Caspar luyken the israelites crossing the red sea, Caspar Luyken, creative commons via wikimedia commons.

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