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Nat Lipstadt May 2017
you don't hear from hear from him for
years
turns out he has been living two little blocks away

a strange lawyer calls Sunday morning,
your presence, requested, suggested at the arraignment court,
as soon as possible, to get him
released from overnight lockup on his own recognizance

sure enough, the Judge asks is the father present
and I stand and he sees me and says set him free
into the custody of that old ghost in the last row

a month later
we sit in my car,
at 11:00pm
engine running,
our mobile phones, side by side
charging from the same source,
waiting for his lawyer to call

somewhere in your huge file of poems
entitled but as of yet unwritten is one called,
the words rational and children are rarely used in a single sentence
together


oh yeah, Leonard's  reminder?

some hallelujahs
come cold and broken
~
5/31/17
500am
notes are always optional, children well...
Nat Lipstadt Jul 2024
wake up to an overcast clouded day,
streaks of palest of sad multi nefarious
blues and white singes, but the effect
is negatory, for its prior predecessor
was glorious in its sunny, grandiose
perfection; perfect in every  respect,
and today arrives with a 500am
greeting of peace but overcast with
sadness, but humility, this is a childlike
an in between day, a reminder tomorrow’s
unfeted fate could always be worse…

yet every day is perfect in its uniqueness,
and in silence but but firmly loud within,
I utter the prayer taught to every Jewish
child, as soon as they learn to speak with
comprehension, these, their daily first words…

”I gratefully thank You, O living
and eternal King, for You have returned
my soul within me with compassion—
abundant is Your faithfulness!
(2)

But in so many things, the Hebrew words
are multi-purposed, shades of complexity
even in though the simplest, plainest opening
word (Modeh)  is intuitive simple…
”I thank you”

Within
a simple direct word of thankfulness ,
lies shadings, just like today’s weather,
in its relativity, in compare of its
less-than-perfect predecessor, are
shades of admission & surrender…

though not obligated, never free to abandon
the unending reworking of the definition of me,
and all the draft versions
as yet, unpublished



Notes
———
(2) the prayer spoken upon awakening Modeh Ani

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modeh_Ani#:~:text=Text,-Gender%20of%20speaker&text=Modeh%20ani%20lefanekha%20melekh%20c%E1%B8%A5ai,compassion%3­B%20abundant%20is%20Your%20faithfulness.
this, the second cut…

(1)

— The End —