Lintels*
This is the bread of affliction
Raw:
It catches in our throats and
Alarm rings like a test but it is not a test
Like a fork, a gold-wired ambulance
Stopped at the border between
Gates of the Old City and
Ringing, humming, singing:
Oh, now we are sons-of-freedom!
We live between
Post-trauma
And pre-
Trauma: for now
Triggers twinkle in
Ear drums
Ringing: for
Now
See how it is deadly quiet.
O Seraphim, remember:
How you rejoiced?
O Burning Ones, recall your
Ululations: exaltation as their chariots
Rimmed golden floated like skeletons of torqued horses
On the softly brushing lips of sky and its reflection:
Water.
No longer slaves!
Laughing: together we sang as their bloated bodies turned
Our tears into Manna
The salt into seashells.
Israel, you cried: Wrestler of god, and our
Song would have
Carried onward toward
Absolution but for one
Insistent reprimand in a still small voice: my children, also.
Nascent nation, the voice grew angry but remained quiet,
Somehow, your behavior befits slaves.
Would that your song were
Exclaimed anew: now
As we recline:
Raising glasses as full as our
Magazines.
O Burning Ones, sing that we may rest
Unblinking: assured of our escape from a
Redux burning. Our flesh tingles still of
Cattle cars, ash, of barbed
Hyssop whips and wires.
Incant to us: Water.
Leaving the bowels of the darkest night, had we a choice but to
Drown our foes?
Red the sea runs, O Seraphim, and you must
Exclaim that we have no choice. You must.
Never again!
Water, O Burning Ones,
Indeed: how are we to ensure
That our First-born Sons float
High above the riverbed of history’s slurping, but by ensuring that Ishmael’s
First-borns Sons, the
Egyptine hordes of our enmity,
Are mollified, muffled, mashed into the
River: submerged?
Tell us how! Tell us why we cannot swallow this bread, why it tastes like rust
And repetition, like rust and repetition. Why does
It now taste like rust and repetition? Why, it does
Now
Taste like rust and
Ecstatic,
Deadly repetition.
—
*An acrostic.
The Leftern Wall 