  |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
Make your holidays richer with poetry. Happy Chanukah however you spell it
Chanuka
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.
Order the book here
top of page
Shalom Shalom
by Joan Logghe
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.
Order the book here
top of page
From the Inside Out
by Christine Hemp from The Practice of Peace.
You scratch a match to light the stove.
From the window I see lightning fill the clouds.
Here the heat and light ignite from the inside out.
Those rainbows, for instance, the two we saw
at dusk: thick truncated bands of color
shone like a fugue on the shoulder of the mountain,
each hue a testament to change. We stopped
the truck to watch them fade, but
they wouldn’t go, the red vine maple
sopping up the colors, giving off another flame.
We finally drove away before they melted.
Have mercy on us, erratic light.
Teach us to know you’ll return again
in different forms: a quickened heart, a blossom
many months from now, a burning stove.
Shape in us the trust that we, too,
among the fading strokes of sunset can be lit
together from the inside out.
To read more about this inspirational book click here. top of page