These poems are published connected to a project support by the DC Mayor’s Office of Community Affairs. David Ebenbach was a featured faculty member at the 2026 Jewish Poets retreat supported by the grant.

On the First Morning of the New Year

From the vaulted ceiling
and through our highest prayer
the tiny articulation of a spider
winds its way down
and finds the rolled sleeve
of a woman who is singing
There are many sleeves
in the room
but now this one
is touching the ceiling

One Hundred Blessings a Day

The rabbis wanted the sacred to be ordinary.
They wanted us to spend the hours texting G-d
with updates on our many minor appreciations,
for waking, for the belt and hat we put on, for
food and water, for the pliability of our limbs,
for the window and the sky and all they attempt
to contain. They wanted it to happen again
and again until it becomes almost natural, like
breathing or using the bathroom, both of which
demand our praises. So that, when we lie down
and when we rise up, we find ourselves mid-
conversation, un-shy, the way a long love works—
a long love and its countless small attentions,
its happy recurring where were we?

Rosh Hashanah

From my folding seat in the backyard
I can hear one hammer
nearby or in fact far away
fixing something I can’t see
maybe fitting a new board into place—

it matters so much, your dying—
but not to this one particular builder

David Ebenbach is the author of the poetry collections, We Were the People Who Moved (Tebot Bach, winner of the Patricia Bibby Prize), Some Unimaginable Animal (Orison Books), and What’s Left to Us by Evening (Orison Books). He is also the author of a non-fiction guide to the creative process called the Artist’s Torah, three short story collections, and three novels. His books have won such awards as the Drue Heinz Prize and the Juniper Prize, among others. He has a PhD in psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in writing from Vermont College, and he teaches creative writing at Georgetown University. You can find out more at davidebenbach.com.

Featured image Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “Brügge (B), St.-Salvator-Kathedrale — 2018 — 8559” / CC BY-SA 4.0