Poem a day #28 The First Defense Attorney Addresses the Jury of History

The First Defense Attorney Addresses The Jury of History I ask you to consider events of that day, the circumstances— no one had ever died before. How can this young man be held to blame for murder when he hadn’t been told humans were not immortal? His parents never mentioned the apple incident. How could [...]

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Miriam (and why one should clean from time to time)

Today was Clean Out the Office Day. Well, step one, anyway, with several steps to go. My reward is that I found an entire outline of a novel I meant to start but had mainly forgotten about. And I still like it. Yeah! It grows from this poem, Miriam speaking about the plague of the [...]

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On the Omer and counting

A piece I wrote several years ago, “For the Sake of the Innocent Fifty”, has been brought back to my mind this week because so many members of my Jewish tribe continue to believe and say such racist, horrible things about Palestinians as a people. Arguing the facts of 61 years of dispossession is never [...]

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Some thoughts on Midrash and the women of Judges

So I set out, as a writing assignment, to create poems about the characters Deborah, Yael, Sisera, and Sisera’s mother from the stories in chapters four and five of Judges. Chapter 4 tells their story in prose – Deborah was a “judge”, which was a kind of charismatic leader/seer. She pushed the general Barak to [...]

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