Where oh where has my little
god gone? Where oh where can He
be? I was told He was in everything,
in every leaf of grass and every whisper
in the back of the Synagogue reflected
His mightiness.
We were once called a stiff-necked people,
but we have gone soft and well-clad.
Necks become stiff from the act of sticking
them out too often, from righteously placing
the body before the machine. The office chairs
at Goldman Sachs and Fried Frank have round supports
for the lumbar and neck, to keep them supple.
It’s the ones with the stiff necks we watch for now:
Madoff, Wolfowitz, Leiberman, Libby.
The best among us lack all chutzpah,
while the worst fill their mothers with passionate tsurres.
Where oh where has it gone, this God of mine?
This God who taught me to love a good argument,
to favor David over Goliath,
to count myself as my brother’s keeper?
My Rabbi asked me once to prove that we are the chosen people.
I could not, because I did not believe it.
He opened his laptop and typed the words into google,
and hit after hit revealed it to be true: the Jew.
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This poem! The use of the nursery rhyme song is so affective and complex and forelorn. I love how you worked the "best among us lack all chutzpah" line (is that really how you spell it--wow--Yiddish). And the last line--my favorite device: surprise rhyme! It works so well.
ReplyDeleteThe last stanza is a neat anecdote, but I question its resonance with the political/sociological/theological nature of the rest of the poem... I guess it's cool that the word "Jew" doesn't appear till the last word in the poem, but I feel like it was more a denouement than a clincher, like an only peripherally related joke, in a way.
ReplyDeleteObviously this is great, but I wonder if the various inroads throughout the poem - money (Goldman Sachs, Madoff), politics (Lieberman, Wolfowitz), and theology - can be tightened together. Though I don't think I know what 'tsurres' are, the lines "The best among us lack all chutzpah, / while the worst fill their mothers with passionate tsurres" seems to be the Core of the thought, but I just can't see the various elements lining up...
Or, to be more to the point, this is all a long way of saying "more please."