Passover During COVID-19 – a poem by Elisabeth Weiss

Passover During COVID-19
 
Today the market shelves were bare
though everything we needed was there.
 
Our story — always one of floods 
and plagues and being smote 
 
was told while what I piled at every place
— wine, soup, fish — it was enough. I set an extra cup
 
for the ephemeral ghost who enters
through the open door. 
 
It was my daughter-in-law’s first time
hearing our verses and pent-up longing
 
brushed with song. 
The temporal world greened 
 
as it beckoned 
this strangely lit story
 
to the foot of Sinai,  
with all the souls yet to be.
 

Elisabeth Weiss teaches writing at Salem State University, in Salem, Massachusetts. She’s published poems in London’s Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, the Birmingham Poetry Review, the Paterson Literary Review and many other journals. Lis won the Talking Writing Hybrid Poetry Prize for 2016. Her chapbook, The Caretaker’s Lament, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016.