Nancy Naomi Carlson
WE WEREN’T SO JEWISH THEN
Dangling our faith on a golden chain,
we gave our children Old Testament
names like Matthew and Aaron and Ruth
to honor the family dead
piling up faster by year—
a whirlwind of covered mirrors, black
ribbons, and yahrzeit candles burning
in glass—and words like brucha and yizkor
at graveside prayer, layering stone
upon stone like ancient tropes,
but still we wedded outside the tribe,
drawn to men who’d never donned a skullcap,
yet stomped on glass, timid shards
in their soles, to prove their accepting love—
our mothers, defied, turned away and closed
their eyes each Shabbat, gathering
candlelight in their hands—a vigil
to combat the dark they feared
we’d brought upon ourselves—more dreadful
than any epithet sprayed on our walls.
DOG STAR
—For Gigi, on the first anniversary of her dying
For loyalty’s sake let’s grant her kind
her due, as even in biblical Egypt
no dogs barked when the Israelites fled.
Talmudic scholars might lend her
the animal soul—the nefesh—let it reside
in her blood, though they’d deny her
that divine spark—the neshama—
that would allow her to ponder the difference.
Did you know that the ancient Egyptians
convinced themselves that the heart
housed the so-called human soul,
and death sealed one’s fate by weight—
heart versus feather—the lighter the better—
though pharaohs got a free pass to ascend?
Do the best dogs get to become one
with Sirius—the size of two suns
and twenty-five times more luminous,
whose dogged fetch and return
ancient astronomers tracked per annum
each time the Nile overran its banks?
And now in these Days of Awe of early fall,
Sirius sits low in the nighttime sky.
We Jews scrub out our sins, like stains,
and remember our dead—human or beast.
After the shofar sounds one last time,
the Book of Life will be sealed for the year,
and we’ll look to the sky for that first star
to signal the end of Yom Kippur’s fast,
when the first bite of food to breach our lips
tastes sweetest after a day of going without,
and a star might wag its diaphanous tail
even in the darkest of nights.
What after all is a soul?