The ultimate secret
That we all share,
That we cannot abide,
That we avoid at all cost,
That we drown in anything,
Alcohol, drugs, tobacco, sex
To avoid facing it..
This secret..
The Mystery..
The sod..
The roz..
This enigmatic kabbalistic gematria
That fails to reveal.
This secret is…
Is our mortality!
Our ending.
Our facing the approaching end.
The end of it all.
Our consciousness.
Our self image.
Our very existence.
In this crisis,
Bathed in tears,
Bathed in memories,
The earliest memories,
And the lost memories,
The a-hah moments,
Saying goodbye…
To mother, holding her hand…
In her fears, in that dreaded hospital bed,
Drowning in her fears,
I am helpless.
I cannot fix this.
She again teaches me,
Having born me,
Facing the end of her Kaddish,
In another month,
(I fear the stopping,
Of this recitationary obsession,
For the nothing=ness
Of the day after
In minyan
Silent.)
In this space between recitation and silence
She lingers
She bears down on me
She remains in my heart
The Secret of Life: The Ending
This force
This presence
Her presence
In her absence
The Schechina
Suffers through her
In the silence
I suffer her,
Bereavement means bereft
Holding those slender violin fingers
In mine,
Knowing what is to come
What must happen,
Knowing in the head
But refusing in the heart.
My holy twin rebounds how Mum
Voiced her fear of loneliness
And she jumped into her bed holding her
Comforting her in her ultimate fear.
And now
Only now,
In these tears,
Do I understand,
The suffering of Her
In Galut,
Schechinta be-galuta
I had to suffer this loss
To understand and feel the Divine loss,
The last 8 verses were written bedema
In tears, by Moses (?)
As if he was prescient
And knew what my mother would anguish over.
The ending must be growing in tears
For us
For her
For Her.
And my own ending,
The three score years and ten that loom shortly,
My own biblical lifespan now exhausted
I must return to her/Her
For strength
To endure this
Awareness
Death and the Maiden comes to my ear.
