When We Were There When we were there in the crooked hell of that scarlet and black room, the world was a useless idol broken and beyond repair. But now we are here, in the cosy tabernacle of this bright asylum, the world seems a god who brings the sun into being. The location of that old place, is hidden by a heavy veil, like the one in the temple; the boundary between heaven and earth.

Photo credit: Rachel Posner / Posner Family Estate, courtesy of Shulamit Mansbach, Haifa, Israel / yadvashem.org The Light in That Place “Our holiday has been turned into a day of mourning” -- Chaim A. Kaplan By lamp and by oil, we hunger the hours as the dusk's frost settles in. There is still time: the freight cars are not ready yet, but we are, we are ready, on this night. Sit, sit down while I set down these makeshift wicks, these meager latkes, this hanukkiah of ours, g

The Moses Tree From the tangle of its roots, To the nests in its hair The tree blazed white and blue. And the tree sang the Lord’s name in flame until roots and hair had turned to ash.

Lifting Up of the Hands By lamp and by oil, we hunger the hours as the dusk's frost sets in. There is time: The trucks to Treblinka are not ready yet and there's bread to be had. But the water and bowl are for the washing of hands. (It's what tradition commands.) Fingers make moves in the silence of thought like chess players at their difficult tables. A mouth is turned open and another is shut, and dusk in due course is steadily swallowed, with every crumb of affliction

When He Planted in the Earth When He planted in the earth a tree of life, a tree of death (the latter with a curse of woe) did God say that this was good? And when He placed upon the grass the serpent Satan and his crew, did He ever stop to think why the Devil envied God? When Adam spied inside the bower that Eve was naked and alone, Was it Satan, was it God Who put the worm in Adam’s blood? And when God wept and cried some more inside a cloud of smoke and gas, was it then he

Tree, 1943 My roots are split & my bone-bare branches brittle. I degenerate in a cruciformed landscape. There are many like me. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times. Woodcutter says we’ve been marked out for timber or burning. The genus, it seems, is being hewn.