Vox Populi
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David Lauterstein: Lulav
On the harvest holiday, Sukkot,
Jewish people take a palm branch, myrtle, citron, and willow.
They bind them together, then they pray,
shaking the lulav in six directions –
north, east, west, south, up, and down.
I felt this honored the earth.
Now how they – we – betray already full ovens of bones.
I am a Jew. I am ashamed of those killing and wanting to kill.
The people of Gaza shake their own bodies
in six directions, with nowhere to go,
their only harvest, soil.
I can’t stand it.
~~~~
Copyright 2025 David Lauterstein
David Lauterstein is a writer, therapist and educator in Austin, Texas. He has been writing for 60 years and is an MFA candidate in Poetry through Pacific University. His latest book is The Memory Palace of Bones co-authored with Dr. Jeff Rockwell (Handspring Publishing).
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Brave poetry (and the sad thing is that now experiencing and expressing feelings of simple humanity involves having courage).
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Expressing simple humanity has become dangerous in America.
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Yes, I know it. Maybe it’s a plague that spreads all over the world
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Oh, I see so little hope for humanity except in poetry…
>
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Thank you.
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So heartfelt. Thank you.
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thanks for writing this.
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David, this is a heart-breaking poem. The last line is so complex in tone, affect, implication, resonance. You undoubtedly know Yehuda Amichai’s poem “the Place Where We Are Right”:
The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.
Your poem understands that nothing now is “right.”
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i wonder if in addition to what you write you can add that you can’t stand the fact that there are sill hostages held in tunnels, afraid. and still dead hostages that their families just want to bury them. 2 years now
not instead of your feelings towards Gaza- in addition
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