Let My Heart Be A Mouthpiece – 10/8/23

Let my heart be a mouthpiece for stories
Of women taken and young children snatched
Violently from homes as death’s lover, night,
Sirened the Shema

I try to imagine to the best of my abilities
Chaotic thoughts of those celebrating peacefully
Innocent concertgoers affirming life’s beauty
Suddenly captive, raped, killed

I call to mind the story my mother told me of
The Megillah passed down from our ancestors
Once owned by cousins in The Old Country
Taken into the woods and shot

I am every one of these people then and now
Everyone who questions, waffles, theorizes,
Dismisses the evil that snuffed out so many lives
Proudly, stealthily, cowardly

Every friend who silently, secretly defends
These atrocities as “retribution” without full
Knowledge of the history of the region
The history of Nazism and Terrorism’s parallels

Is empathy’s adversary in the face of a forest
Full of smoke choking inhabitants dropping
To their knees they are the absence of water
And understanding’s enemy: disavowal

Sometimes I have been that misguided friend
So I sit in judgement of my self, soul flickering
A yartzeit of resistance against numbness
Every person is a universe

Every person is a holy verse the question is
What are you reciting what are you repeating
In the echo chamber of ambivalence
Or worse: cognitive dissonance

How is calculated murder ever justifiable?
Are innocent women (raped), families, elderly,
Children’s souls gruesomely stolen excusable?
My mezuzah fell down

Last week it was stuck with double sided tape
To the outside of my door for almost 30 years
It stayed up a miracle I took for granted how it
Remained but even more so

That it went unnoticed in a city of millions I am
No one special just another Jewish girl
Expressing herself hopefully leaving this world
Slightly better than before

But tonight I kissed its seraphic sparkling case
Recognition tears streaming down my face
Irrefutably when war hits home is when one
Most laments guilty I am

Of that reality every day of my life though I try
In my small way to stay informed and contribute
What I can ongoing to those in duress,
Without bias, ever-striving

Learning what it is to be human manifesting loss
Lighting candles silent-screaming zero tolerance
For ambivalence looking in the mirror seeing
My cousins’ faces they may be gone

I don’t know
Tonight what new horrors
Tomorrow’s Dead Sea dawn faces
But its spirit is indefatigable