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How I Observed the Day of Atonement

If you are unfamiliar with day and its observance,
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Kippur

In a place of perfect solitude,
No crowded synagogue within to hide,
No cantor to intercede on my behalf,
I spoke words of mine own creation
To my creator who wisely empowers me
To judge myself, for knowing, none harsher,

We two,
Old travel companions,
Upon worn grayed, adirondacke thrones,
We overlooked,
A natural prayer place,
Bay and breeze, white-clouded and sun-laced.
Only the full time inhabitants, the animals,
Grayling butterflies to match and contrast,
Eavesdropping on our Greek dialogos, in this,
Palace of Perfect Solitude.

Amiable did we chat,
I of family, this and that.

He, wearied from recent travel,
To Syria and India,
Was glad for a day off,
For he had little to do,
But wait for twilight,
To then close the books.

For us no formality, easy the going,
No prosecutor no defender in residence,
For we exchange these roles intermittently,
The incriminatory, the penance, all deeds displayed,
No adult games of winking eyes, and
Hidden heart, secret chambers,
Rabbinical or angelic intercession.

He does so love his Bach,
Adagio on strings,
My soothing gift to him,
This music more than divine.

He returned this courtesy.

Warming sun to expose my chest,
Cooling genteel breeze offsetting,
The bay emptied of wayfaring skiffs and yachts.

A cooling beverage proffered,
But sighing, he said that he had yet to find
A beverage that his kind of thirst could slake.
For his eyes, tho shining, did not effervesce,
As when we shared this day in years past.

Too much killing, this year,
It tires me so to tabulate human excess,
Spoke not a word, for my critique would
Comfort him less, if at all.

Thanks for Kol Nidre, he plainted,
So I too can disavow,
The best intended oaths I took and take,
For each year, I fail more than the year before.

If only I could sit with each,
As I do with you,
Where what needs saying,
Is said, understood, undisguised as praying.

A schooner to the dock did appear,
For him it attended, for him, it waited,
Sails, both black and white.

He stood to depart, my arms-grasped, taken, he graphing,
Measuring my fortitude, my strengths, my divinity.

I do so love this day in your company.
I shall sit with you again one year on,
Bach sweet when next we meet, please.

Soft spoke, as almost I should not hear,
Your time is nigh, no thing I create is forever.
He spoke with such sadness,
For well I knew, the intent, his meaning.

He, for-himself, saddened, for he loved
Sitting  beside me in this manner,
Since my inception, never deception,

Only He resting easy, when he atoned before me,
And I gave him his absolution conditional,
As he gave me,
mine

<nml>
September 2013
Written: Sept/27/2025

I have nothing that i'm waiting for this time.
No errands to run,
no odd jobs to **** the *** of.
The bugs walked off me and gathered out on the highways.
So, how do we shine forth?
You know and I know that God has won the battle.
Though suffering is apart of life we manage it not run from it and now I can accept that.
I've come to the realization that Tucson, AZ is my motherland.
The tears have stopped streaming.
I was crying out to Dad and He would tell me things late at night in the guest room at my in-laws:
"You are my beloved". and "With you and Regina I am well pleased."
When at a restaurant in New Mexico she told me God was placing a white shawl around my shoulders to comfort me.
I could see it last night.
I trusted God's plan and will trust it for this next adventure
for the 37th chapter.
There really is a silver lining.
There really is need and wants and desires with a hand on the cool grey stone.
This life can be majestic and beautiful.
We can see the A mountain in the desert
and accept that one day 15 years in the past that
we'll shine forth.
A poem on starting my career
Nat Lipstadt Oct 2014
October
2014

White Tissues

a thousand years ago
I had to do the shopping,
(short story, irrelevant)

angry, she,
always angry,
the ex called me careless+...
never quite remembered to buy
the no~color tissues,
white only, on the list ordered,
to avoid decorative mismatch clash
to not offend the bathroom guests's
sensibilities and refined fleshy color palettes,
and not to match thereby,
to unduly reveal
the mismatch of
two lives incompatible

she ****** the color from my life...

still now,
buy only
whitely, precisely,
always,
for the colors
in my life, of my life,
have now been returned to me

but they are best cherished,
visible inside, looking out,
painted filter to enhance,
to reveal!
the joys inherent
in the colors of a
refunded, redounding rebounding,
re-fined happiness internal

tissues white now employed
to store the joy colored in colorful tears,
re-defying re-de-finding-fining
the contrast
from the sorry past,
tears now in living color
shed while writing
this happy colored vignette

~~

Poems of Color

just too much
colorless cold,
to decamp to,
sit upon
the well weathered Adirondack throne
that is by his name,
by the cold waters,
now winter coated with
white-capped amber bluewaves
arriving jack-frosted on the lifeless beach

over this weathered sanctum,
natures supremacy reigns,
no matter the season or
his faulty human body's
weak reasoning,
it rules,
despite your frail poetic absence

but without your imposition
upon companion grey,
ensconced patiently
in that rarified atmosphere,
where and when
the sea sword
knights and inspires
the benign, benighted poet,

the human in him
frets and worries

where and when
ever again,
will nature deign to rain
poems upon him and his
winter-storaged writing organs?

the poet,
through his own
winnowy window reflection,
sees the sight of
the empty chair
between him and the sea air and
pondering more,
how shall he ever write
in the upcoming months of bleak?

through the frost-edged glass,
that old chair,
now sudden animated,
sensing his poetic human presence,
it turns toward its missing occupant,
voice aged reassuring,
speaking,
rhyming, 
it chants,
somber intoning...

"the poems writ yet still  undiscovered
but inscribed upon
my weathered slats and armrests,
have your name and no other,
therefore, there fired,
perforce,
they await your return,
come spring...come summer

now is the season of your hibernation,
we sense your fearful
winter forebodings and
speculations of consternation

know these unopened poems
are in fluid stored,
when you return
to our joint station,
we jointly will celebrate their
first day of naissance

you are charged,
you sole possess the
eye colored liquid visions
to see them
in the splinters and the breezes
through to their natural
childbirth revelation"


~~~

The Colors of Life Everlasting

blondes, brunettes, redheads,
the goodbye colors of the
street's tree choir members
and their leafy gowned denizens,

the good stiff chill upon them,
the selfsame chill,
in my anguished mind,
now hiding

those partial unclothed trees,
to me sing,
a comfort food song
heard above the quiet terror of the
noises of a winter's wind precursors

*"we green,
will be again
tho old,
spring green
is signature of our almost
life everlasting

once you wee were,
free green uncaring, youthful,
presumptuous presuming
that you too were,
in possession of
life everlasting

your colors
have changed too,
the process,
your process, different,
unlike our scheduled
rebirthing maintenance

yours a continuum slide,
with no reversal allowed,
no returning
you
to your first days of
crayon drawing youth,
unlike us,
a calculus of impossibility

we will turn young again
for many seasons more,
you,
never will

new eyes will feast upon our
glories refreshed
and love our
green visor shade cast

yet special are you,
the man-poet
who was chosen
by forces controlling,
to see and to tell,
witness-write of our annualization
during our overlapping
frames in time

when to the shade of hades
your physic sent,
our limbs, our leaves, our lives,
as-long-as-they-too-shall-last,
will cover thy remains and
give your poems back to the
sultry summer breeze from
whence they came,
and the colors
of your words
will be then
the colors
of your life everlasting"
10-26-14
The bardess looks at the skies as colored deep lavender with the doves whiter than the angels wings gliding by the breeze, the eclipse of a woman's soul is now unconcealed for the higher art of all things, she feels the tension, fall, and rise of the stories of now and the ones yet to be written, searching for  messages and meanings that are as pieces of magic lingering as lighthouses in  the shades of her.
I would pine with another in our resting by an older tree under the mellowness of the fields while listening to words of feeling, we are  rising with the pages of our lives soon to be lived and later penned in the books of the hereafter and us.
this verbal wishing well, appreciated,
a nut of good intentions but drives me
deeper into de-spare-ing  downing detentions,
for it is only the article's genuine genius,
that elevates the human spiritus, to godlike status

no ditty this, but a wail, shriek, for
human touch is gift so greatest,
that any day passing without
either, neither but both, 'tis one
truly wasted,
a deduction on our
calculus of inited^ human intuitions,
a failure of our greatest inventions

a subtraction of our
gainful living, a purposed ecstasy
our one and only inexact
measure of measurement
that defies pedantic notions of
things of weight or volume,
but extends our own existence

sans
the armies of embrace,
the electric elected syncing,
of the shocking sharing of
closing the borders of divided spaces,
a soft contusion, a realized illusion

a de minimus of our days,
a lessening of our lessons,
a loss of earning livingness,
a nail in our coffined basket,


and here to cease without surcease,
the elemental incalculable numbered
members of our total human races,
that so tragic in  a twenty four expiry,
that the bonding of affection goes
unexpressed...

offer you my armory of arms,
cleanse us both with showered kisses,
inform you thus of our emboldened connection,
voiding these lowlife separators of lineage divisors,
what matter color, gender, chosen god nomenclature,
any of this nonsensical human inventions for distancing
divested human beings from each other


tho eyes closed, and all our senses flaring,
when we confirm what we were born knowing,
there is nothing greater than the human touch


PostScript

my first and best poem of the day,
how it came to me goes unbeknownst,
but will practice what is preached
with any and all willing encountered souls,
and perhaps, come-end of day, will write,
once more, one more, re heaven on earth

7:02am
Tue Sep Thirty
Two Thousand and Twenty Five.                                                       nml
^
"Inited" is the simple past and past participle of the word "init," which means to start, set going, or to be the first process started during a computer's boot-up sequence. The word "inited" is typically used in a computing context, referring to a system that has gone through its initialization process

^^
see this poem: https://hellopoetry.com/poem/438236/nothing-is-so-healing-as-the-human-touch/
When you're afraid to speak, you sell your rights for nothing
You sell your conscience, your soul and country for nothing
When you're afraid to express yourself, you don't subsist
You're no longer alive, you're dead, and you no longer exist.

Writers, poets, professors, professionals, teachers and students
Be not afraid to say something, to tell the truth, to tell it like it is
Language is the easiest form of communicating, say it with ease
Say it like brave beings and have no fear to face the elements.

When you speak, say it loud, with all your might, force and soul
Speak like a Hero. Be brave, be fair, be just, and be strong and bold.

Copyright © September 2018, Hébert Logerie, All rights reserved
Hébert Logerie is the author of several books of poetry.
~entirely for irina~

in search of perfect cleanliness,
the flowering scented sense,
aura of perfect cleanliness
we write, return, close the book, and
then question our imperfections not fully
soluble, so we lift life's newly soiled loads,
and with detergent pen, erase the old stains,
for the new day's chores, begin and end,
again and again, then again,
this cycling, circling is never fully reversed
our ***** laundry, in poetry, cleansing,
but we bitter bite our own mocking laughs,
for after this poem,
comes ten thousand more
and time, with words more precious
than newly mined gold,
from the land where east meets west,
demands without surcease,
endless re and repolishing
,

so by sunlight's glittering
dawn's arrival, we are momentarily healed.
but never ever more fully revealed,
and once more, in next's poem
dawn,
our own re~
cycling never ceases
Sean C Stucki Sep 23
Written: 9/22/2025

If you declare the Heavenly Father's glory with your waking breath;
as the greatest on high! For every morning?
Then you'll gain His knowledge and wisdom.
But, on the despondent day: Tuesday, I fall
into the hours of temptation.
Even after my own private declaration.
Then I remember how millions blame God for this and that.
Is the 'invisible hand' keeping you down?
Or do I believe that us pawns allow our own removals.
They fall below the separators into steel and chaos
where the leprosy grows lower than the walls.
Capricornus the laughing god pulls the strings of those who
bang against the flaming panels of poverty
and believe this life is a carnival of flailing body parts.
Life is a circus but not a joke.
Entertainment and the world’s valor blinds.
The lovely act of repentance is shared
And we climb out while cutting the strings off.
With red beating eyes we dust off for the next day
And watch from a far Capricorn to instill his
Power, supply and demand.
A poem of warning to those who seem eternally stuck in bad times.
abecedarian Sep 16
passion
thirst
hurt
ephemeral
physical

cold heat
hunger
water walking
brutally real
physical

skin colors
words spontaneous
devious planned
desire desired,
physical

concrete
parchment thin
muscled strong
catch a caught
physical

making
creating
cresting
cannot live without
physical

electric
shocking
eclectic
varied
realized

why? stop here?

eyed
fingered
tongue tasted,
ear sensual
dreamt

famous
buried
tragic
comedic
gaming played

unsafe
at any
speed
languorous
fire immolating

physical chest pains,
incurable
incumbent
to possess
otherwise, death

fingernails poking
knuckle kissing
lips wetting
blood exchanging
oh yeah physical

foreign native
young old
permanently temporary
infinitely finite
definitely unending

nowhere
no expression
dying dreams
best better
agonizing

agonizing
unrequited
offer everything
receive shoulder
colder than hell

defensive
offensive
cape laid
walk on me
chivalry

until we hold each others fingers knotted
until I stroke your hair unexpectedly,
until we agree to hell with all the rest
until we say the say the same thing simultaneously
until we come together

when we have satisfied each and every one of the above,
freely confess
know nothing of love
but the picayune details that make us greater
greater than greater, greatest, then and only then
we, might have a few clues
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