A Three-Course Meal for the New Year (poetry)
Sklarew, Myra
A Three-Course Meal for the New Year Myra Sklarew This stalk of day-old bread cannot move my soul into the new year. I am left behind again in the synagogue where the rabbi quotes...
...I am left behind again in the synagogue where the rabbi quotes divorce statistics and heals loneliness with transcendental Jewish meditation...
...I am left behind holding the yellow ticket which provides me one unreserved seat on the hard bench of the sanctuary...
...I wave it like a bee on a string, afraid it will sting me, afraid to let go...
...Myra Sklarew is Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature at American University...
...From the Backyard of the Diaspora, published by Dryad Press in 1976 won the 1977 Jewish Book Council A ward for Poetry...
...Later on I will take them out to the river...
...Four services going on at the same time— a little god spread thin on next year's sandwich...
...The small husks of the days of the old year hover in my room...
...A Three-Course Meal for the New Year Myra Sklarew This stalk of day-old bread cannot move my soul into the new year...
...His fingers parted in the cabalistic blessing, I slip between the spaces and come home, the new year already at table before me...
...Come to the synagogue, the rabbi says, but leave, he cautions, with deliberate speed...
...And later I will visit the grave of my mother and offer praise without knocking on wood and take my first taste of the sweet year...
Vol. 3 • September 1978 • No. 9
