ROILING
Two sticks rubbing together
make fire. The physician tells Momma
her condition is fair.
In Yiddish fayr means fire.
She says, Oy, my condition is a fire.
A fire kills. She forgets a fire also warms,
saves lives. Cooks meat. She forgets she loves
the salty taste of cooked meat.
Momma called me zwariowa, nerwowy,
meaning crazy, nervous. That’s what
she called anyone who was angry. Even the word
anger, she forbade. Let alone a raised voice,
glaring eye. Uvashie! Watch out! Fear,
which sounds like fire, was fine, encouraged,
contagious. Momma used to turn my carriage
to face away from the waves.
She says they made me cry.
Maybe it was God’s roiling vastness.
A glimpse of the sea’s inscrutable ways,
its shooshing sounds—endlessly impersonal—
that made my soul weep for Love’s largess.
Momma and I landlocked on a tangled continent.
No borders between our countries.
A continent where no land belonged only to me.
Doris Ferleger is a winner of the New Letters Poetry Songs of Eretz Prize, Montgomery County Poet Laureate Prize, Robert Fraser Poetry Prize, and the AROHO Creative Non-Fiction Prize, among others. She holds an MFA in Poetry and a PhD in Psychology and maintains a mindfulness-based therapy practice in Wyncote, PA.