Martin Haber

Golem

Golem waits in the attic of the Alterschul
on Spinoza Street in Prague, Czechoslovakia,
The Great and Learned Rabbi Loew stamped the secret letters on Golem's forehead-
they shine in the darkness of the attic closet,
where Golem stands in perfect stillness
among the mops and buckets and cleaners
Golem does not know that he is stuck in that closet in the attic like an unplugged vacuum cleaner
Golem's eyes are open but they only see The Void of Darkness
Golem's eyes will only truly open up again on The Coming Day of Judgment
then they will see again the city he laid waste to
four hundred years before
when Rabbi Loew set him free to wreak havoc upon the Gentiles
but, like a precision missile gone wrong,
he cut through the peasants who had nothing to do with the persecution of the Jews,
smashing the skulls of the witnesses to the atrocities
heaped upon the people the Rabbi had brought him into life to protect
Golem became drunk with his own gargantuan strength
and savaged the assailant and the assailed alike
like the rough, dumb beast that he was
so Golem had to be immobilized, intercepted, incapacitated,
a witless, sexless Samson shorn of his mighty, luxuriant curls,
already blinded with his carved-of-clay eyes

Golem does not remember his unraveling,
any more than he remembers his occult birth,
but he can only come alive again
if a descendant of Rabbi Loew breathes life into his great nostrils
since it must also be a Kohain, and a male, who enacts the
Rabbi's Cabalistic equation, the one Simon Ben Aria's spirit recited for ten days straight to Rabbi Loew
flowing ever-after like a monstrous baby formula
through the Rabbi's bloodline

So Golem stands in his embryonic stillness,
an unleashed myth,
a dis-enclouded Zeus,
a re-enchained Prometheus,
a thunder-less Odin,
so humiliatingly,
for a land-locked Leviathan to be locked
in a broom closet
in the attic of a synagogue
where the staircase is made of creaked and rotting wooden stairs,
that no one bothers to ascend
to check on Golem's whereabouts
because it seems
Golem has been forgotten altogether,
and has become an anachronism,
since the world of terror,
has surpassed even the antic rage of Golem
to possibly suppress or tame it,
for though he is inanimate,
Golem can feel in his terra-cotta spine
the horrors unleashed as he sleeps
his giant's wide-eyed sleep,
he absorbs the warring world's agonies,
and especially, the redundant cataclysms of the Jews,
over the centuries and over the earth's surfaces,
but he can do nothing about them,
he can affect no agency,
except to stand,
like a great but vanquished clod of earth, an Eve-less Ad-am,
and wait
for Mankind's redemption,
when Moshiach comes,
and the Dead are awakened,
from their eternal sleep,
then Golem
will come again- live again- rise again
like a furious Lion
loosed upon
the cobblestone streets
of ancient Prague


Pepitone

I TURNED 65
on the day Joe Pepitone died
Those are 2 good reasons to cry
(Does anyone know why I'M still alive?)

Joey P. was 82
He was the last of that pin-stripe crew
He out-lived The Mick by half-a-century
Maybe a long low-life was his destiny!

He was like The Darker Brother
who hailed from South Brooklyn, not Oklahoma
and, if he had gone the full road to ruin
“Lefty” would have been his “nom de plume”

But he was discovered just in time
to at least delay a life of crime
And for a few seasons in the sun
He seemed to be The Golden One

All along old 7th Avenue
He gang-banged with his Sicilian crew
He must have cried, “OOMBATZE!”
The day that he got shot

The slug from the 45
Left him just barely alive
It was touch and go through the night
The priest even gave him last rites

But with the “Hail Mary's” said by all
He rose again, harder than The Fall
And though he once more “seized the day”
His fierce Papa's heart gave way

So, with an “angel on his shoulder”
and a nod from Leo Durocher
Instead of being “6 feet under”
He was with “The Boys of Summer”!

In the '60's he got famous
More wild than Joe Namath
High and cocky,
but nattily groomed
1st blow dryer in the locker room!

Dark eyes, and wicked ways
Dark hair, and dark toupees
He could party with the best of them
and come alive back in The Stadium

But, with an error in the infield
With the fans, his fate was sealed
The Dodgers took The Pennant
Pep never heard the end of it

And then, in his “wraparounds”, and on the run
He lost a fly ball in the sun
He told The Press it was the glare
But it was the dark shadow of his career

It had come back from “The Slope”
Extinguishing the hope
That had flared like a Roman Candle
'Til it got hotter than he could handle

And so, the Shadow of The Streets
slowly led to Joe's defeats
He got busted for Possession
And for a car trunk that held a weapon

He served some time, and he got sprung
But he was no longer young
He got married, got divorced
Spent what seemed like years in court

Still, he came to The Old Timer's Games
And the stands would chant his name
And he'd throw his arms out with exuberance
For his Battle had lost its Dubiousness

Does it really matter to ask why
He was such a troubled guy?
He ran with a wild crowd
He lived his life Out Loud

He's there for me, on that Parnassus
With Yogi, and Mantle, and Maris
He may have been more flawed than the rest
Maybe that's why I loved him the best!

Out of The Blackboard Jungle
From the days of Old Brooklyn's struggle
For those like him, he did atone
This Ode is for JOE PEPITONE!


To My Next Incarnation

This life on earth has been a funny business,
as I reach the age that means examining the expanse of years
which go on galloping away behind
disappearing into the Alhambra of waking to sleep so as to sleep to awaken once again
thousands upon thousands of times over
with this aging once nimble body I inherited and still inhabit
I advise you to be better directed towards your end goal
whether it is conquering the intricacies of making love like a marathon runner,
marking time and the performance so that the moments of release are
reverential and liberating
not just for your self, but for those many-bodied selves you will have entered
and withdrawn from, in a lifetime of nights of fitful or fleeting embraces,
or whether it is
training the mind to master a medium,
and to transform that medium into high art, or sublime song,
so that whatever form you inhabit upon The Return
has the incantatory melody
of this destined-to-be (mostly) forgotten existence
taking voice within the new mortality
a tinny echo during transmigration,
just so this “I” that is “Me” is, for a snatch- away moment ,
aware of having been fully alive and aware
down that East River of Eternal Return,
maybe a vibratory twitch of a dolphin's dorsal fin,
an involuntary flap of a blue heron's outstretched wing,
or- more likely-
betting on this “go-round's” self-deprecating humor-
when I was able to laugh at my own foibles, at least as often as the normally non-committal cosmos laughed at me,
it will be the burrowing depth of a many-eyed crustacean,
its pincers feeling the taste of some snippet
of its' previous above-ground, two-legged life,
there in its murky subterranean empire.
And if its true that we will all be here again,
and again, and again,
and that the inevitability of our reincarnated souls
means the cavalcade of living and dying in myriad forms,
a carousel of “deja-vu's”, shared without our conscious knowledge,
through the faces and bodies and minds we are manifesting in perpetuity,
then you, my embryonic soul-in-the-making, you also will be lost and found and lost again,
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
throughout Time Immemorial


About the Author

I am a Brooklyn native, and a retired Special Education Teacher who taught for over 30 years in the NYC School System- I taught for 20 of those years at John Dewey High School in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn. I did a Fulbright Exchange in the late 1990's, and lived and worked in Sheffield, and London, England. I moved to Woodstock with my wife and daughter full-time in 2016, and have taken part in facilitating Reading & Discussion Groups, on topics from Native American History, Immigration Literature, &, most recently, Muslim Journeys, thanks to grants from Humanities New York, and the kind support of The Woodstock Library. I have substitute- taught in the Onteora School District schools, and I deliver meals for Woodstock Meals on Wheels. Mostly, I continue to explore the beauty of The Hudson Valley- with our adventurous dog Glendia-and these meandering walks often inspire my creative writing!

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