Summer of 2013

A hospital caretaker 
replied to my hospital critique
by saying. "It's not home."
Many replies came to mind
One was - "It's not even 
someone else's home." 

J Vs. P

You take your
authority figures
and I'll keep my
intuition
You keep on citing
experts
Meanwhile I'll sigh
and quote my soul

Summer 2013

You said that when
I spoke before a
crowd I became 
Superman
I say now, you
were Superman
all the time

Children grow up and away
Adults forget to remember they were children
Night falls for everyone
Days come and are gone
Let us always accept 
Each other

Disappointment said to hope
Why make people expect things?
Hope retorted to disappointment
Why do you have to hurt people?
Their friend named love spoke up
And said, either way I am there
So either way it will be okay

Poem 35 (With Introductory Story)

Long ago there was a field owned by two brothers. One of them had a wife and children while the other had no wife and children. During one wheat harvest they bound up shocks in the field and beat out the ears and made two equal piles of the grain they had reaped, one pile for each of them; and they left them there in the field. 

That night the brother who had neither wife nor children lay in his bed and thought to himself: “I am all by myself and have nobody who is dependent on me for his daily bread. But my brother has a wife and children, so why should my portion be like his?” So he rose in the middle of the night and stole like a thief and took sheaves from his own pile and placed them on his brother’s pile. 

And his brother said to his wife: “It is not fair to divide the corn in the field into two portions, half to me and half to my brother. My lot and fate is so much better than his, since God has given me a wife and children while he goes alone and has no pleasure or song or delight in anything but the grain he gathers in the field. Come with me, wife, and we shall secretly add to his portion from our own.” And they did so.

The next morning both brothers saw that their piles were still the same size and this kept repeating itself for a few days. Finally both brothers staked out the piles and realized that both were giving to the other brother, they embraced and kissed.

That was the place that the Lord desired, the spot where the two brothers had thought good thoughts and done good deeds. That was why it it is on this spot that the Beit HaMikdash was built. 

(Adapted from Bin Gurion I, 491-2; Bin Gurion II, 272-3, as discovered in and discussed on the blog Menachem Mendel, by Michael Pitkowsky - http://menachemmendel.net/blog/two-brothers-a-field-and-the-temple/)

--------------------------------------------

Mordechai Meir

If the holy Temple

depended on us and our

brotherly love - I wonder

if they ever would have built

more than half of it

Binyamin

After we quibbled about

my waiting at one train stop

and you being at another

we drove quietly in peace

and then you pulled out this:

"I know it's morbid, but

I think about what you'll say

about me in your eulogy

because I know it will be good."

And though I think about it

twice a day, we both know that

there will never be words for

what seems to have to go unspoken

33 - Freida Maryam

You never visit me

not as a ghost, not in a dream

maybe that's because already

you live underneath my skin

And every now and then from behind 

my eyelids, you give a push and I cry