Wax

After the hearing
After sifting the detritus of violence and dysfunction
I am in my car
I turn on the radio
I take off my shoes
I roll the windows open to everything
Which is unlike that which dominated my morning.
My heart is hungry for the world
Beyond this little community playhouse of pathos
Where we act out monotonously sad
Yet hideously various dramas
"In re: Girl X", "In re: Boy X",
In all their sorry splendor and array.
I am not complaining.
I have chosen this domain
The public dumpster of the judicial system,
Other people's mess,
Which seems to stick to me on days like these,
Makes me want to turn myself inside out
And stand out in the rain.

These afternoons I wax the floor.

How can I explain the mystical healing effect
Of this practice somehow restorative of faith and sanity
Conjuring the essence of all that is good, dignified and noble
The purifying herbal smell of carnauba wax and lemon oil
Transporting me
To small New England libraries with dark wood shelves
Worn leather chairs, old books with covers like saddlery,
The smell of deep and holy quiet.
To graceful echoing churches
Where I have seen worn arthritic women run soft rags
Over altar and pew, floor and rail
In the attitude of reverent pilgrims
Praying Stations of the Cross,
Wisps of white hair straggling from under kerchiefs,
Clumsily hidden halos.

There are people who do not scream ,
Who do not spit and accuse,
Lie and scratch and burn and tear at the
Tender flesh of babies,
Fail to feed them, break their bones
Sell their small doomed bodies for drugs
Slake with them their rage and fevered hungers.

I will summon them now,
The people who write the books,
Those fine aged works
Of noble sensibility
Of great and ordered thought.
Those strong and humble women who caress the smooth wood,
Light the candles,
Who turn for one last look
Cross themselves, touching knee to floor,
Though no one is there to see.
I run these thoughts around in my mind like a cool white pebble.
I close my eyes and breathe in the knowledge
Of heroism and selflessness in people.
I believe in the Communion of Saints.

I will sit like this for a long time,
Rubbing the long oak boards
Till they softly shine
Till they glow like blessed candles
In the empty church.
In an hour my own children will come
Down from the schoolbus steps
Across the sweet green lawn
My own children safe and well
My own children fed and whole
And we will embrace,
And we will embrace.

(First Published in Ruah)
Nancy Henry, North Parsonfield, Maine




Drinking Tea in Kabul

Rockets flash briefly
across the chilled sky,
plumes of smoke, ash
carried off
by impending winter.

Over the lintel of the entry
to the Inter-Continental Hotel Chicago,
carved deeply into the marble
Es Salamu Aleikum
staring implacably
through ponderous
brass framed doors
onto the Miracle Mile.
Countless guests
pass below it
unseeing.

My son and I
sit across a small table
spilling bits of tapas
onto the cloth,
laughing lightly
at the young boy
bathed in a puree
of tomato, his shirt
dotted in goat cheese.
My son explains
the inflation of the universe,
gravitational waves
cast off
by coalescing binary
neutron stars.
His words pull me
deeper
into my seat.
We speak somberly
of the jet engine
parked haphazardly
in the Queens gas station
unwilling to mention
265 lives
salted across
the small community.

We embrace
by his door, the few
measured hours run.
He turns to call
his girlfriend,
I turn my collar up
against the November night.

The Red Line train
clatters slowly back
into a sleeping city.
In my room
I brew a cup of Darjeeling.

Louis S. Faber, Rochester, New York

*"We will drink tea in Kabul tomorrow morning, if God wills it."
- Basir Khan, Northern Alliance Commander,
quoted in the Chicago Tribune,13 November 2001.


To a Lady

Were there from above, an Angelos of Eros
A messenger of Love to us come down,
It would be found in her form.
Warm gold and glowing alabaster presence,
Her knowing mastery of sound and sense,
Passion profound, her existence
Justifying, exemplifying the title "Lady."
Lady of ladies.
And in the moment that I met her,
I bore witness not only to what
A woman may become,
But beheld in awe and reverence, the sum of all
That one woman was.
And in the moment that I met her,
What in me lurked dark and strange,
Changed to sweetest sanity.
By her transcendent humanity
Was admission regained
To that particular paradise I thought forever lost.

W. Adam Mandelbaum, New York


 

 

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