Pre-Pesach poem

Back at ground
zero, ocean level

The mountain looms,
beckons, looms again,

beckons again. Sisyphus,
did you say Shehechiyanu

with each new time of climbing?
What is the nature, the color, of

the rock I roll up this year to receive
my Torah once more upon its rounded

faces? How will the chiseled words erode
this time as it tumbles back into the creative

and all the more frightening for being so depths?
Am I the rock? Is God the one rolling me? God, if

so, I praise you from the depths for your persistence

Withholding

Hello all,

I plan to keep many new poems off of the blog for a few months so that they do not count as "published." But I am more than happy to share them less publicly and to receive any feedback people want to provide. Please contact me at mollyemoses@gmail.com if you want poems via email this semester; I will send out a batch once a week, most likely on Sundays.

Omer poems will continue to appear on the blog, starting with a Pre-Pesach poem on April 3.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

-Molly

Now

The snow flies at my face
turns right saying Change here,
you change here, Here
is where you change, here, you're
already in the middle of it

Firechild

Firechild putters mutters breathycoldcold
This isn't it, not paths through narrowsteep
snowcanyons, huddlescarf loweredeyes
watchmystep, life is armsthrow wide into
power into powder the directions, fingersjolt,
eyefling smolderglow etchleaving stareglances
nightflashes, I am dance I am stretchtoyou, I am
reachtoyou, I am touchtoyou, I am withtoyou, I
am withtoyou, ozonecracklesphere, I am here

Present

In my room
at 12:45 PM
the sunlight
meets the scarf
upon my bookshelf

and the blue wall
is no longer blue
but the color of blush

Yordivor (Psalms 30:4)

I'm scared
of the Yordivor

chomper of time
and motion

Others are here
but we can't

open our mouths
No sound

enters
or gets out

Tardis the Tortoise Goes to School numbers 1 and 2

Creature 1: I hear Aisha and Molly are gonna start a comic
Bunny: Oh really? What about? Love? Dance? Gender? Food? ETERNAL SALVATION?
Tardis: it better be about me you guys

A: Dude, did you see that the president of Argentina adopted a boy to keep him from turning into a werewolf?
M: Yeah! He was a seventh son.
T: I was an eleventh son. That's why I'm a tortoise
A and M: ...
M: I'm so sorry.
T: Nah it's okay, I really like lettuce

Eighth night

The last candle-
wick has a
little flame left

Eighth day is
different, there's no
ninth night to

come, we're back
to one, to
oil, to exactly

where we needed
to remember we'd
been looking for

The future

Once seeing
the future
I want it

Why is
my growth
yet to do?

Mrs. Which,
can you just
close the wrinkle?

Time does not
exist in a
line, there are

older and
younger people
all around us

Journeying

Written during the Hurricane Sandy indoor days, Oct. 2012, while studying at Yeshivat Hadar.

        Sounds like you are really
        journeying,
she said. I knew what she meant, but it still took me by surprise. Woke me up a bit. Hadn’t been thinking of my life like that, hadn’t designated these months as a time for personal development, for growth, for "discovering myself," none of that sort of stuff. I guess sometimes a journey takes long enough that you cease to remember that you're on one, that you're traveling across some sort of internal or external ground. It’s like riding the Trans-Siberian Railroad for three days straight. If you look out the windows you see the landscape scrolling past, but with the curtains shut you can forget you’re even moving, forget that there’s a life to live outside of your companions, your bed, the toilet, the aisle, the water dispenser, the instant soup. You’re stationary. In a space instead of traversing a space. The trip becomes everything that has ever existed—until you arrive, when all of a sudden, it’s like the trip never happened. Your journey, once its own lifetime, becomes some hazy recollection of happiness, a dream bookended by disparate realities, a dream severed from reality. As if you’re a Sorry! or Candyland or Chutes & Ladders game piece that landed on a square, slid along a squiggly path, and ended up on another square farther along the board. For a second you slide along, maybe accompanied by some sort of sound effect, but no one really cares about the squiggle after the fact, not really.
        Except for in conversations about one’s "Jewish Journey." Then everyone’s fascinated. It’s suddenly all about the squiggle, about using calculus to tease out the discrete points and angles and velocities that form the curves of your increasing and decreasing levels of frumkeit. What were the seminal events and people that led you to be where you are today? How did you morph, silently, ponderously, to accept ideas and positions you once ridiculed?...