A poem concerning our shared Hebrew 30 class experience (pure magical boston/the world being the size of a pea coincidence she/@inkahootz was at the secret twitter amanda palmer concert last summer) I also wanted to preface this long/weird poem- a lot came out here as i don’t write enough/often about my identity as a burlesque jewesss. anyone who knows me truly knows i’m a rah-ther dippy spiritual lady who incorporates my hippy mysticism-thinking w. psychoanalytical thought, and it’s a not uncommon but sad aspect of my religious education that well, my standardized religious education experience was pretty depressing/upsetting! Hebrew in college bummed me out- i wanted to be enjoying it but often felt dumb/way behind my classmates despite the inherent beauty of the ancient language, what it meant to me.
This is a long ambivalent poem because it’s a long/ambivalent road sometimes. i try to regret nothing- i feel quite good having written this. i sheddup w. the dithering now. The italicized epigraph-first-line-title-idunno is something i wrote in a poem at age 14. The art below is from the magical Orianna/Bethany/Tikvah ~ a positive, creative, always-surprising hippy lovely friend of many adjectives.
She is the whispered page of the haftorah,
letters dancing backwards.
Being in cahoots with purple ink
and notebooks were my only solace
in after-school Hebrew school.
The writing was on the wall,
the only private school Socialist
outcast with public school kids
with their smart t-shirt logos.
Once I drew a tiny pencil
circle beneath the window and
Adam (who once knocked my lox
& bagel into the grass at a picnic)
tattled. I sat outside the classroom
door tearing off my pinky nails
under the construction
paper trees of life.
Once I was even laughed at
for reading ahead in group
Torah tales, “Let me spoil
the end for you. Moses dies!”
My too-young-too-large-too
hair-sprayed mean Sunday morning
teacher shrieked, shaking her mane.
She was so like a Cathy comic
mixed with Medusa mixed with all
the wrong Jewish stereotypes…
+
So unlike our too young, so bright-eyed
(no, not too young, he’d served in the
Israeli army already) Hebrew level 30 teacher
my third semester of college. Ten? Years
after my religious education - fluorescent lighting,
basement classroom, repressed memories.
Yet, he was so sincere, from a different plane(t)
of olive trees/complexion, real zeal, vines
and violence. And he had a naïve glint
in his eye, standing before the pastoral
dark green chalkboard. He didn’t yet know
how spoiled American co-eds
could be. (Even if that blond boy once
shared his new flavor! Diet Cherry
Dr. Pepper with me, though he’d never talk
to me in front of his cool leather’d friends.)
I couldn’t tell our khaki-clad teacher
when the kids too lazy to take
the language proficiency exam
(pseudo-fluent from their folks)
cheated off each other during tests.
I was embarrassed to be sporting
a paratrooper’s winged gem
on my messenger bag (though I’d bought it
at the military surplus store in DC).
There were so many actual Israeli
and Palestinian students, who was I to advertise—
What exactly? I covered the winged
diamond with cross-stiched iambs,
rose-shaped knots, pentameter—
a plea for jeweled love.
William’s sonnet #52 I’d learned
in that same Lown classroom
though my enrapturement,
evocative reaction to Renaissance
Poesy was far from Hebrew 10, 20, 30…
In love while counting syllables, learning
Christ’s body as clumsy celestial metaphor
for mailbag, courtly love’s spurned verse
mirroring my own broken vanity,
a poisoned Renaissance Faire Rat heart.
I was more worried about being found out
as the radical ecumenical Paganfaerie Bu-Jew
that wanted to learn to speak in runes
and ancient tongues as much as relearn
the Hebrew script, Stoppard plays, music sightreading,
epic recitation by heart—
I never worried I’d be found out to be
a bad poet. We are the people of the book.
These pages aren’t as holy in memory as I’d hoped.
+
We are the people of the book. Un peu maltranslé,
désolée. I speak Frebrewlais.
My first semester of Hebrew
(back when I couldn’t match the words
for door with window and chair with desk,
even pen to paper—)
It was pure release from purgatory
to leave five minutes early
with my wide art portfolio
scraping my calves as I scampered
the long drop down slate steps
from the humanities fortress
(high on a hilly rock face)
descending into the crater that was
the rest of campus.
In another memory I stand eternally trapped
in front of my Hebrew class resisting
the urge to tear off my rings, wringing my
notes. It is the third day of my last
semester of Hebrew, I am introducing
my absent-that-day getting-to-know-you partner.
I must then share myself, as well:
“My partner, Nomi, she likes to wear
black clothes. We—we like to wear black clothes.”
Anachnu o’heh’vim…
I don’t say, “We are the lizardly,
and locksmithy inked Jewesses” of Room 201.
How is it my moonstone-wearing painter
friend knew the word for “sea” in ivrit
while standing in the sandwich line—
and from her Hebrew school days?
All I remembered was flame.
I’d fall asleep for a fifteen minute
stint after cramming verb conjugations,
gulping too hot too cream’d coffee with
my homework buddy’s cell phone
alarm between us crashed out
in the library mezzanine.
I remember all the in-class movies
were surprisingly racy, avant garde.
During The Song of the Siren
a voluptuous-tressed woman with
scarlet scarf streaming behind her screams
into the wind standing up in a convertible
that tears down Tel-Aviv streets
during some kind of hide-in-your-basements
scare. Her lover laughing behind the whee(l).
“Come out of your houses!
Then go back in again!”
Behind the scenes by David Aquilina :)
