Rosh Hashanah (Cambridge Massachusetts)
I wake up to birds warbling
outside my window;
slight traffic swooshes by.
I know the schools are closed today,
and the synagogue down
the street brims
with men wrapped in cloth.
Stripes and tussles.
In the balcony above — away
from rabbis and Torahs and all
that is holy — skirted women hold
prayer books and hush their tots.
I think of the dos and the don’ts,
the pleas and the angst.
And the God I failed
to find among the reddish stone
three millennia old, in a desert
five thousand miles away.
When I walk by the synagogue,
the intoned recitation,
Baruch Atah Adonai, Elohainu Melech Ha’olam,
wraps me with sounds of home.
I halt at the gate, one hand on the latch.
A midday sun, a ripe orange floating in a field of blue,
seductive as a dream,
pulls me away.
Toward the river I step:
trees in green September leaves;
ducks bobbing in the shimmering stream;
the whispers of grass blades;
the smell of fresh water.
And the intonation murmuring upon the wavelets:
Baruch Atah Adonai, Elohainu Melech Ha’olam,
echoed by the afternoon sun. Veiled by a drift
of clouds, then round and glowing once more,
pouring rays of life — a benevolent goddess.
And the year starts anew.
Rinat Harel holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Exeter, England. Her writing has been published in various literary magazines and received several awards. She currently works on a poetry collection titled Poems from the Boidem.
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