July 26th, 2008
BEING JEWISH IN A SMALL TOWN
someone writes kike on
the blackboard and the
“k’s” pull thru the
chalk, stick in myplump, pale thighs.
Even after the high
school burns down the
word is written inthe ashes. My under
pants’ elastic snaps
on Main St because
I can’t go toPilgrim Fellowship.
I’m the one Jewish girl
in town but the 4
Cohen brotherswant blond hair
billowing from their
car. They don’t know
my black braidssmell of almond.
I wear my clothes
loose so no one
dreams who I am,will never know
Hebrew, keep a
Christmas tree in
my drawer. Inthe dark, my fingers
could be the menorah
that pulls you toward
honey in the snow.
–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007
July 25th, 2008
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T.S. Davis, RN
THE GRAVEDIGGER THINKS OF
The gravedigger sits on the backhoe smoking a cigarette.
It’s quiet beneath the trees that partially hide him
from the scrum of mourners beset by grief, regret,
their weeping faces wan and pinched and grim.
The gravedigger waits until the last one leaves,
then yells to signal his men to lower the box,
and turns the key that wakes his rumbling beast
that lumbers now to move the dirt and rocks.
The gravedigger fills the hole until the mound
remarks upon the grass like blood on skin.
And when he cuts the engine there is no sound
except the whispered shush of trees in wind.
The gravedigger thinks of all he needs to do
before he sleeps tonight, like me, like you.
–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007
July 24th, 2008
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T. S. Davis, RN
A KIND OF GIFT
…I resign’d myself
To sit by the wounded and sooth them, or silently watch the dead…I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet wound,
Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so offensive,
While the attendant stands behind aside me holding the tray and pail.I am faithful, I do not give out,
The fractur’d thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen,
These and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in my breast a fire, a burning flame.)
—from the poem “The Wound-Dresser” from Drum Taps by Walt Whitman, 1865
Imagine Walt Whitman moving among the Union soldiers’ beds lined up like fallen dominoes, holding a dying boy’s hand, mopping a feverish brow with a cool cloth, bowing his head while a gangrenous soldier prays for his life, touching water to parched lips. What’s the connection between being a nurse and a poet? I don’t know for sure. And I am a nurse. And a poet. I know the connection is elemental, almost primal, but it’s difficult to talk about, to analyze, without seeming almost voyeuristic.
I was a poet first and became a nurse later because I needed a day job to support my real profession. I wanted a vocation that would allow me to work awhile and quit, to move from place to place and always be able to find a job, to work whatever shift I wanted, and to get a decent wage for it. But there are other occupations that afford that, so what attracted me to nursing? Or more to the point, what has kept me a nurse? I had friends who were nurses, and surely that made a difference in my initial decision. But as every nurse knows, when you talk about your job, most people react by saying, I could never do that. Why is it that so many poets can?
I’d like to be able to argue that poets are a special breed, sensitive, compassionate, and empathetic, and certainly that may be true. There’s no doubt that those are traits needed to make a good nurse as well. But that’s not the whole story. Another trait of poets is the desire to strip away the trappings of civilization and the accoutrements of culture, to get down to the fundament of existence, to engage love, procreation, spirituality, death, to marvel at the universe revealed in a leaf of grass, and to somehow bear witness to it all with mere words. Nurses experience all this and more.
July 23rd, 2008
PRAYER
Perhaps as a child you had the chicken pox
and your mother, to soothe you in your fever
or to help you fall asleep, came into your room
and read to you from some favorite book,
Charlotte’s Web or Little House on the Prairie,
a long story that she quietly took you through
until your eyes became magnets for your shuttering
lids and she saw your breathing go slow. And then
she read on, this time silently and to herself,
not because she didn’t know the story,
it seemed to her that there had never been a time
when she didn’t know this story—the young girl
and her benevolence, the young girl in her sod house—
but because she did not yet want to leave your side
though she knew there was nothing more
she could do for you. And you, not asleep but simply weak,
listened to her turn the pages, still feeling
the lamp warm against one cheek, knowing the shape
of the rocking chair’s shadow as it slid across
your chest. So that now, these many years later,
when you are clenched in the damp fist of a hospital bed,
or signing the papers that say you won’t love him anymore,
when you are bent at your son’s gravesite or haunted
by a war that makes you wake with the gun
cocked in your hand, you would like to believe
that such generosity comes from God, too,
who now, when you have the strength to ask, might begin
the story again, just as your mother would,
from the place where you have both left off.
–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007
July 22nd, 2008
Aseem Kaul
A POEM FOR VALENTINE’S DAY
I swore I wouldn’t write
a poem today.Instead, I decided,
I would do my taxes.So here I am, receipts
scattered across the floor
like forgotten letters,
stacks of dates that refuseto add up, and a heart
that keeps trying to
calculate just what the last
year has cost it; how much
it can get away with;
what, if anything, it is owed.
–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007
