From Detour Ahead
12/7/20
(Yom Kippur 5781/2020)
Restaurants crowding the unmasked gulping
in what life can easily digest
streets panicked, parking spaces
gobbled by shoppers grasping at air—
Are the synagogues closed from pandemic?
Or shules shuttered finally, thousands
of years after altars graced
with goats and rams their throats slit
their crimson flooding like triumphant flags
heralding a landless nation —
And now we scurry in a nationless land,
our voices extinguished even as we cry out
still even as we gasp with breath
meant to recite Torah instead
today, swaying gently backward
then forward in equal measure —
our human pendulum marking a time
when we had not already atoned enough.