Jewish questions

If we remembered Jerusalem

2000 years

and returned with guns and chutzpah,

why should Palestinians

ever forget?

When we say “Never Again,”

do we mean “No more mass murders”?

or just, “Next time, we kill the

‘Others’”?

When we boast of the might of

Yeretz Israel,

do we consider how our armies

contribute to warming?

Do we feel the deserts,

our almighty just

desserts,

dead ahead?

The bird flu over the cuckoo nest

As rumors of another pandemic

flu across news sheets and web,

everyone wondered

what horrors now awaited ahead.

The vaxx haters gathered

in red-faced alarm,

swore no arms would be jabbed

whatever the harm.

The billionaires pondered,

what stocks should I buy?

while you and I shuddered,

who will live? and who die?

v.1 June 7, 2024

Meditation 2 20 24

As climate change breeds mosquitoes and malaria

ever Northwards across the US South,

and breeds fascism even faster than

mosquitoes,

I sit on this park bench

contemplating the pond before me

and the looming death of a civilization

that Gandhi called

“never civilized.”

What will nations do

whose imaginations know only growth,

only progress?

How will they act, love, and kill

as heat, fire, and storms

grow, grow, grow

as economies once grew

and the decades left to live

shrink in a final countdown?

What drugs? What orgies?

What hatreds?

will be our final swansong?

What use will all those trillions of dollars be,

all those megatons of missiles?

as the last corporate warlord sits

abandoned in a lonely mansion

with no one

anywhere

to obey his

commands?

Purim, 2024

I scribble this poem in a park empty of children

in a center of American Zionism.

As I walked here,

kippahed boychiks bounced basketballs

in family driveways,

gleeful girls skipped to friends’ homes

bearing baskets brimming with food

for today’s celebrations of Jewish

survivals.

Hundreds will smile and laugh

as they eat their fill of stuffed cabbage and hamentaschen.

The signs outside their homes proclaim

“We stand with Israel.”

In Gaza, children huddle in puddles of urine

in shattered homes where brothers once lived,

trembling at thoughts of bomb blasts and bullets.

Their stomachs are empty, but they lie too terrified

to cry.

Surviving parents search for trucks bearing food,

prey to Zionist soldiers and bombs.

In the homes around me, sated kippahed children

chat idly of playing in the sandbox

in the park where I write.