walls

May 18, 2023

IN ABSENTIA

It is, I think
her lips I miss most
their butterfly flutter
across my cheek
then her eyes, almost feline
that see within
behind walls
hastily erected
that fall to her sight.
It is all of that
and the whispered words
linking hearts
that still echo
as she slides into sleep.
I cry out to Morpheus
my words are swallowed
by the drone
of the engines
that fall as rain
into the Sea of Okhotsk
to wash onto the shore
of Khabarovsk.

First Published in The Globe Review, Issue 2, April 2023
https://heyzine.com/flip-book/4f02f9b80a.html

April 27, 2023

THE WEIGHT OF MOURNING

The weight of mourning defies precise measurement,
and all of the rules of mathematics fail in an attempt.
Grief rejects being placed on scales, there is never
a moment of pure equilibrium, only a teetering
that always threatens to bring it all down in a heap.
A million who are nameless and faceless is an agony
and yet eighty thousand with names on white walls
of the ancient synagogue in Prague seem
to weigh as heavy or heavier on the heart,
and the youngest of those taken are the heaviest
a burden almost too great to bear,
no lighter for our freely flowing tears.
And yet a woman, nameless, faceless
and dead a dozen years, who I knew as my mother
but nothing more, save odd facts that insured
it would be all I would ever know, that woman
was a crushing burden, but one I had to bear alone
and did, if barely, until the moment
when by twist of fate and DNA, she had a name
and soon thereafter a face, and as I stared at her,
as I stared, too, at the mirror, the hole she left,
that emptiness grew vast and heavy, and I
must now struggle not to collapse beneath it.

First appeared in Peacock Journal, February 2017
https://peacockjournal.com/louis-faber-three-poems/

March 4, 2023

WRITTEN

It was written for all to see
but went unseen as no one
entered the portal willingly,
never sufficient curiosity
to offset the foreboding.
Everyone knew what it said
but knowing and seeing are
separated by an unbridgeable chasm.
It remained an imposed solitude,
an isolation inherent in location,
implicit in a world spinning
off its moral axis, time extended
and compressed, an irregular pulse.
It was written in a long
forgotten language, a warning
etched into the walls of time
faded from inattention, left
to stare out knowing the outcome
they would never see until it arrived.

January 20, 2023

MY RABBI (PART 1)

If you ask why I am a Buddhist
I will tell you there are a myriad
of possible reasons, choose one,
or take this one, it fits nicely.

I am in college, pulling my grades
up to mediocre, thoughts of medicine
gone, law only faint on a distant horizon
a master’s degree away.

I visit my childhood rabbi, a man
who has been my guide through much.
I peer into his office, his door removed,
and he bids me to come in and sit.

I do, slowly, carefully negotiating
around stacks of books piled
on every possible flat surface,
the walls covered in bookcases

straining to hold their loads, I
knowing a too loud sound, a jostle
and the avalanche would be
impossible to stop, disastrous.

August 14, 2021

LINES

We love drawing lines and borders. There are few things we do better than that. But increasingly we have lost our once finely honed skill at placing them where they ought to be. I won’t even get into walls on borders to keep out families, those like our families were once. I mean small lines and borders. What line decides whether the old inn is ramshackle or quaint? Is this thing I found in the attic a tchotchke or a collectible? And seriously, is what am I about to write doggerel or humorous verse? I’ll be the judge of that one.

July 23, 2021

FORGETTING

What they don’t want to see, or are
perhaps blind to, is that it always
came down to boats, and fear was
always overcome, the ocean tamed.

Today, it is trucks, trailers, and still
boats, and fear is still overcome
for the promise of better, for
the hope for life without terror.

None of the arrivals came invited
many were turned away repeatedly,
but if they still breathed they
would continue the attempts for

such was the value of freedom,
from tyrants, oppressors and fear,
but we have forgotten them, those
who are why we are here today,

we so willing to build walls, to turn
others away for they have no
invitations, for we offer none,
the country being ours alone

March 9, 2021

THE ROOM

It was a strange room,
that much I recall, with heavy
velvet curtains covering
what should have been a window, 
and might once have been, but no longer. 

The only light was a bare bulb
in the ceiling, casting 
a soft amber wash across 
the time worn oak floor,
and once white walls.

There was a chair, nondescript
and now long forgotten
and a small metal table, once
gray its paint flaking, its surface
mottled and uneven.

Still, I sat in that room
for an hour each day, staring
at the walls, and looking deeply
within, and finding both empty,
have never returned there.

February 16, 2021

ARGOT

There is a language
spoken within a family
that no one outside speaks.
It may sound familiar
but listen carefully
and learn otherwise.
It is so with my brother
even though there are
thick walls between us
and yet, in a few words
intentions are obvious.
He keeps me far
from a place
I’d just as soon not go
and in her panic
my mother hears only
our words and not
their hidden meaning.
It is when we fall silent
the conversation begins.

December 4, 2020

APPROACHING

The perfect time of day
occurs only as the dead
of night approaches, that
moment when the heart
of the city falls almost silent.

In smaller cities this moment
is protracted, arising as the moon
reaches toward full expression
and such as pass for tall
buildings settle into sleep.

In the great cities, those
that claim never to sleep,
the city reverberates, echoing
off the endless walls of glass,
and silence never fully
arrives, so we cling
to moments that approximate
what we imagine
silence sounds like.