by Phyllis Hotch

from Another Desert: Jewish Poetry of New Mexico

Children mirrored in a dark window
reach to light candles
tall and small in line
Songs dance above the flames,
Songs of a miracle in
Ladino, Yiddish, English
They turn and turn to music
from a shtetle across a faraway sea.

Two big frying pans,
latkes in peanut oil,
not frybread not sopapillas in lard.
Bottles of sweet wine, platters of cakes,
piles of pennies on the floor
and a dreidle carved by a santero
who shrugged as he cut a piece
of the story into each side.

All on the floor with the children
Tewa, Taoseño, and mestizo Jews
twirling a wooden dreidle
a miracle in each face.

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Shalom Shalom

from Another Desert: Jewish Poetry of New Mexico

Light forty-four candles
it’s that season again,
when money and love flow thin
and clean and wild as a trout stream.
I want to splash it all over,
stretch it eight days like temple oil
in the everlasting light.

Six stars of peace and one more candle.
Love is rarefied in mountain air,
inhaled like a day without a shopping list.

Christmas Eve it’s the fourth night,
Light me four candles.
Shalom, Shalom.
Stay quiet till it’s wick and wax,
then one by one they’re out.

In the morning the house is electric
with children from two worlds early,
earth and sky, dreams and tiptoes
on top of the stairs,
asking, "Just one present now?"

We nod yes, reluctant to leave our bed
and see it all end,
father Christmas and the Channuka woman,
overlapping in flannels.

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From the Inside Out