The Good Words Don't Burn

A Sonnet for the Subway Riders Avigayil Rosensweig The day was dying over into night And I descended duly underground And saw the subterranean carriage light That round red eye that pointed homeward bound Through parted doors, the dozing riders peered In heavy-lidded, end-of-day fatigue I claimed my seat, the beast unfurled and reared And galloped down the tunnel, league by league Each shoulder pressed against the next, they sagged Their daylight lives emphatically remote The sprawling man who clutched a plastic bag The woman in the camel-colored coat Beneath the city, in this buried part This pulsing cavern deep within its heart

Urban Lullaby Avigayil Rosensweig On a seven train one evening, winding its way home Past brick-laid rooftops, its rattling an unsteady urban lullaby I caught a glimpse through your bedroom window And saw you, a mound beneath a floral bedspread A splash of lamplight, dark hair on a pillow You, like most of the city, asleep Unaware, or aware, that every passenger saw you sleep Hurtling past on slender rails above your home Beheld you, unprotected, your cheek against the pillow Perhaps you hummed yourself a lullaby Lonely, as you folded back the bedspread Threw open your curtains to let the city in through your window Rain beaded on the train car window You looked like a child, unguarded while asleep How they fling themselves across the bedspread Unafraid, because they are home Soothed into slumber by a parent’s lullaby Small heads barely denting the pillow By midnight lying horizontal to the pillow Dappled by light coming in through th...

More Songs of Zion Avigayil Rosensweig There is no dirt beneath my feet Instead, shall I favor the flagstone? Walls built by one they call Magnificent They are old, but nothing to The ancientness which lies beneath The ashes of your sanctuary--scattered Bulldozed and brought to Mount Scopus Only the outermost of your inner walls Do not lift your eyes higher-- Gold is blinding in sunlight Instead I will fly to the Galilee--to the desert--to the hills On borrowed wings To watch scrub brush turn green in springtime Crumbling dust swells with water Ibex flit swift-hooved among the stones Curved horns slicing the sky I perch on a synagogue sill Carved like a seven-branched candle Voices unravel, weave together The chamber is hung with cloth-- Spaces and people are draped with it The fog rises, the window clouds My wings unfurl through darkness, Shedding feathers one by one, They settle down like snowflakes-- The last before your floodlit parapets I have r...

Birth Pangs Avigayil Rosensweig Would it have been better, if you had never been— Had you been stillborn, half-hoped phoenix that never rose from ashes so thick they choked the ground: charred bits of one one after another wooden synagogue I was not there to pace the corridors at your birth, but I remember the first time I gathered your infant self in my arms and felt your trembling vitality. They wrapped you in a blanket: blue and white, like a prayer shawl. I remember your profile, distant against the horizon: all scarlet plumage and gleaming talons, terrible and beautiful against the night sky, as distant as the celestial bodies which painted the heavens around your wings. Born of ashes, but incandescent as flame. And I could never tell which one you were: mythical creature or natural born child. Sometimes I look sideways at you and fear you will disappear, soar into the heavens with great wing-flaps which be...

The Face of God Avigayil Rosensweig "לְאָדָם מַעַרְכֵי-לֵב וּמֵה' מַעֲנֵה לָשׁוֹן" (משלי טז א) (Proverbs 16:1) I drew the face of God: Indeterminate ink lines Bleeding colors through white computer paper, My fingers small and clumsy, Markers scattered across the kitchen table Sticky with milk splashes and slick from a Then-recent spill of paint varnish, The table sunlit, the wallpaper curling at the edges, A drawing as formless as anything that can be said to have shape, As though I were trying to draw the wind Blowing over the face of a primordial world, Even at that age having somewhat internalized That Maimonidean principle of Divine incorporeality. My mother said it was beautiful, And my brother said, "Don't be silly. You can't draw a picture of Hashem." Once I asked my father The meaning of the ten sefiros in kaballah. "Theosophic emanations," he said. I said, "Oh." Another...