Standing at the End of Yet Another High Holy Day Service
And the same Hebrew lines, long since Sunday school days,
ripple through me into stale leftover air.
Thank God, old Mr. Pummelroy cranks open
a window. It has poured, it's cooler.
Somewhere a coin clinks the ground.
Ellipses of feet, a you're it!
A rumpling by of voices and laughter.
An occasional crest of wind billowing in.
Leaves hold dark green verbiage,
wrinkle the air by flitting like a thousand paper
dollars, a thousand turned pages.
It's getting dark, almost done, still here.
A footnote says if we'd follow
God, then the Lord your God will restore
your fortunes. There are possibilities,
abundance, change—"For Kaddish, turn
to page 321.”
There's a tender wind on the walk back home
this early evening, a fold in nature—
late summer hanging on a line, fall on the shelf,
shadow not quite settled into standing waters.
Robert Manaster's poetry has appeared in numerous journals including Rosebud, Birmingham Poetry Review, Image, Maine Review, and Spillway. His co-translation of Ronny Someck's The Milk Underground (White Pine, 2015) was awarded the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation.