My creative writing mentor Carol Moldaw wrote this poem about the Jewish cemetery in Penang, Malaysia.
In a patch of flattened weeds in front of the graves
where a Kohane's stone-carved fingers part to bless
the remains of Penang's departed congregation,
barefoot Malaysian boys were playing badminton,
a sagging string strung pole to pole their net.
Our Chinese trishaw driver, too old to read
the map without his glasses, with five hairs long
as my five fingres growing from a mole,
he waited for us. He'd found the street although
the tourist map was wrong: the name no longer
Yahudi Riad, but Zaimal Abidin.
A rusted lock hung open on a chain
slung loosely round the stone and iron gate.
From a tin-roofed shanty, a makeshift squat
just inside the walls, a woman watched us
unbuckle the chain and let it hang, the gate
creaking open enough for us to pass.
We walked past the boys, into headstone-high grass.
Lizards scuttled loudly to get away.
It looked decades since they'd been disturbed,
the newest markers twenty-odd years old;
no plastic wreaths; the only pebbles rubble
from the path, unpicked, unpolished, unplaced.
Dozens of graves, from the eighteen-thirties on.
Wolf Horn, Aboody Nahoom, Flora Barooth,
Semail Lazarus, Jacob Ephraim--
who but us had read these names this year?
Pedaling us away, our spindly driver
had breath to spare, shouting against the traffic
what he'd found out while we were shooting roll
after roll of the cylindrical stone mounds:
there'd been a temple once, the Malaysian woman
had said, but nothing, no cornerstone, was left
of it, nor any living Georgetown Jews.
He himself was fifth-generation Malay,
and had no ties to China.
Later, walking
along the arcaded five-foot walkways, stopping
every few steps to gawk--at rows of shutters,
peeling plaster the color of robins' eggs,
cats with open sores, an Indian man
reading a Chinese woman's palm--you point
across the street to a neighborhood mosque,
its minaret's crescent moon spiked
with crows. They scatter at the muezzin's call,
regather on a red-tile temple roof,
where Kuan Yin in her mercy gaurds her flock
and the air inside is smoky from our prayers.
A can of joss sticks rattles in my hand.
I fan the smoke toward her. What's one less temple
in a city of temples, a city of worship and trade?
What's one less altar? Over on Queen Street, when
the lime rind flares, lit with an oil wick,
I place it in front of a jet-black Hindu goddess
whose bosom heaves for me as I make my rounds.
Sitting here, in the courtyard of our hotel,
on a stone stool, at a stone table, writing
the day's impressions down, I miss my God,
his featureless face imposing itself
among the more expressive others,
whom he himself has banished, but whom
I also love. Remember the beggar this morning,
in front of the Krishna Cafe, where we ate
using only our right hands, how he grabbed
your wrist in thanks, kissed the back of your hand
and wouldn't let go until I began to tug
at you from the other side? I saw the look
that swept your face and also--
he might have picked your pocket.
Last night, drinking at the E & O, I said
I'd spend all our money on one perfect
ruby, if only I knew where to find it,
how to recognize it, and its true worth.
After I scraped my knee in the monsoon gutter,
I thought of those cats, the open sores on their sides.
One bruise starts before the last one's healed.
To calm myself, I lit a stick of incense,
but now, though far from home, and despite myself,
I find I'm reciting what I know of the
Sh'ma.
A rabbi once explained to me that the Bible lists so many genealogies because that is the immortality available to us--for our name to be repeated through the ages. Perhaps, but this poem, to me, articulates just how pitiful that kind of immortality is, if that's what it is. Whether our names are repeated, whether our names are left in dark silence year after year, isn't it simply a matter of time, and little time at that, before
we disappear from memory? How little time passes before Moldaw's question--"Who alive could tell me who they were?"--applies to each of us.
Moldaw's poem puts me in mind of Psalm 103, especially verses 15-16:
Man's days are like grass,
like the bloom of the field, thus he blooms--
when the wind passes by him, he is gone,
and his place will no longer know him.*
It's the last line, isn't it? We will be gone, and we will no longer be known. Think of the contrast with the poem's crows: They are scattered but regather once more. We do not. Life's last wind passes over us, separating us from one another, forever. Similarly, Qohelet says that "the dead know nothing; they have no more recompense, for even the memory of them has died" (9:5).
But in the Shahkarit service, this is what we claim: "
Human preeminence over beasts is an illusion when all is seen as futility.** But we are Your people, partners to Your covenant, descendants of Your beloved Abraham to whom You made a pledge on Mount Moriah. We are the heirs of Isaac, his son bound upon the altar. We are Your firstborn people, the congregation of Isaac's on Jacob who You named Israel and Jeshurun, because of Your love for him and Your delight in him.
Therefore, it is our duty to thank You and praise You, to glorify and sanctify Your name. How good is our portion, how pleasant our lot, our beautiful our heritage. How blessed are we that twice each day, morning and evening, we are privileged to declare:
Sh'ma, Yisrael: Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai ehad. There's something much more honest, I suppose is the word for it, in Moldaw's poem, at least for me. She finds herself reciting the
Sh'ma, not after a declaration of safety and refuge, as in the Shakharit passage, but after connecting her own pain and injury with that of the open-sored cats. The line "One bruise starts before the last one's healed" enlarges the circle of suffering to include us all, doesn't it? For me, the Sh'ma is said because we hurt and feel loss (and lost), not because "our lot" is "pleasant." There's something contradictory in that impulse, I guess, but it seems truer to me than what the siddur places before us.
And that is why, finally, the poem moves me so much. The way it lays alongside one another images of our aspirations for meaning, for connection, with those of sorrow, of separation. The way it threads together Moldaw's words to her companion with the last scene, in which she is alone, speaking in silence and partly-remembered words to a faceless, absent G-d. The way it makes me feel a kinship, even if it's only one of mortality and the need for blessing, with the unknown dead.
*In the introduction to his history of the Great War, Martin Gilbert quotes Meir Ronnen: "Millions died or suffered in the mud of Flanders between 1914-18. Who remembers them? Even those with names on their graves are by now unknown soldiers."
**The first line of the Shakharit passage both echoes, and radically changes the meaning of, Qohelet 3:19-20:
For in respect of the fate of man and the fate of beast, they have one and the same fate: as the one dies so does the other, and both have the same lifebreath; man has no superiority over beast, since both amount to nothing. Both go to the same place; both come from dust and both return to dust.
