The World Was Silent Then

THE WORLD WAS SILENT THEN

The world was silent then-
Six million Jews among them more than one- and one- half million children murdered by the Nazis and their helpers-
And now when from one end of the world to another
One hears ‘The Jews are cancer’ and ‘We will wipe out the microbe Israel’ and ‘Every one of the Zionist dogs must be shot’
And when Ahmadinejad and Nasrallah and Kardawi and Imam this and Imam that scream for the blood of every Jew in Israel-
It is business as usual at the U.N.
And more North Koreans missiles in Iran
And Russian uranium at Bushehr
And Chinese technical help for the Revolutionary Islamic regime
And cowardice from the West,
And mild mild mild protest from an occasional leader here or there-

The world is largely silent again
The Jews are a small small people and Israel is twenty-thousand kilometers all in all-
And after all who has the oil and one eighth of the earth and more than fifty nations and with them too the most progressive of the most enlightened of the most extreme Left?

‘So why not let it be done
Another few million Jews gone

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poem by Shalom Freedman
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All The Poems Remain Written Where They Once Never Were

ALL THE POEMS REMAIN WRITTEN WHERE THEY ONCE NEVER WERE

All the poems remain written where they once never were
The grass and the skies of Whitman form lines in the mind of Baudelaire
The trees and dark cities of the distance form single sounds in the heart of the poet who cares
Night is more than darkness and day more than an early setting out
Each thing influences the other and calls back its own origins and end
We are going somewhere we will never know whether we write eternal lines or not
Over everywhere can be heard in the morning light the selfsame sound that through the heart of Ruth burned the alien corn
Keats is not dead, and Borges is not dead and Kafka is not dead and Wordsworth and all those who wrote great lines are not dead
Poetry is the last first eternity of the living word
And those who can hear the sounds of others greater than themselves in their own lines know
We are all writing down this last poem for ourselves and no one else
Though as we go to pray each morning the minyan tells us secretly
All our prayers together are more than any single poem can be alone
In the grey long distance where no one hears any poem at all
God writes and rewrites for us all the book of the stars in which dread is no longer a name
And beauty bright bright beauty is heard and reechoed as more than we will ever be
God is the only Poetry in the End
God is the Only One who never will be dead..

poem by Shalom Freedman
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I Am Too

I AM TOO TIRED TO WRITE A GOOD POEM

I am too tired to write a good poem
I am too cold also
I have been out all day in the cold and the rain
I have been doing errands since early in the morning
I babysat for four hours in the afternoon
I went out again in the cold and rain to buy a few groceries
I tried to write and could not
I read and overate a few times
I tried to write
But I could not
I am very tired now
A poem should not be a simple clear description of one’s own mood at the moment
I am too tired to write a good poem
But I try to write
And this is the result
A poor poem indeed.

I AM GRATEFUL FOR THE PARENTS I HAD AND HAVE

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poem by Shalom Freedman
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I Walked Last Night In A District I Lived In For Almost Twenty Years

I WALKED LAST NIGHT IN A DISTRICT I LIVED IN FOR ALMOST TWENTY YEARS

I walked last night in a district I lived in for almost twenty years
I came back after being away for a time
To visit an old and ailing friend
The streets were empty and lonely as they often were then-
I thought for the first time I understood how lonely the district itself is-
‘A lonely district’
I wondered how I managed to live there all those years
And how anyone still manages to live there-
I looked up at the sky and wrote in my mind a small poem of a kind I wrote many of in my years there
I remembered teachers and friends who had lived there
No longer of this district or any district on earth
I wondered how life goes and how from so many years so much life has been lived without having any place in my memory
I felt as empty inside as the district without
I did not have to wait long for the bus
And relieved inside it I put my heart to home
So many years had been lived there
I remembered taking my small children to the playground there
Now they thank G-d have children of their own

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poem by Shalom Freedman
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Kohelet Again It Is Not Just The Vanity Of Vanities

It is not just the vanity of vanities
It is not just the truth of the contradictions
It is not just ‘a time for this and a time for that'
It is not just ‘Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth before the evil days grow nigh'
It is not just ‘Better a living dog than a dead lion'
It is not just ‘Enjoy your days with the wife of your youth'
It is not just the eternal truths
And the poem of the long home-
And the turning again and again of the wind and the water
And the sun and the sound-

It is not just the sheer beauty of the thing and its words
Despite an occasional archaic ugliness
It is not just the truth that cannot be gone beyond
Because this is what life is and what the grave is and what we are
It is not just too ‘that the making of many books much less the making of many poems is a weariness of the flesh-

It is that after all the years I have arrived at the time
Where the golden bowl may be broken and the voice of the grinders made low
And man return to his eternal home-

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poem by Shalom Freedman
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I'm Tired Of It All

I am tired of it all
I am tired of today
I am tired of the summer heat-
I am tired of all the years of trying to be something
And still being nothing and no one
I am tired of myself and my ambition
I am tired of reading the great poems of others
I am tired of Poetry
I am tired of being old
I am tired of no longer having the means to help those I care for-
I am tired of having written for so many years
And having so little to show for it-
I am tired of being an old man getting older -
I am tired of being afraid of what is going to happen to me
And those close to me
I am tired of having so many sick friends-
I am tired of having more and more people I have known who are dead
I am tired of a world in which violence and stupidity play such a great part
I am tired of all the problems that should have been solved years ago
And yet persist-

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poem by Shalom Freedman
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Oh Dad

OH DAD POEM WRITTEN ON THE TWENTY- SECOND YAHRTZEIT OF MY FATHER 11 Sivan 5769

Oh Dad we are all together again
Ma is here and Jakie and Joycie
And Bubbe and Zayde Freedman
And Bubbe and Zayde Zeibert
And Abie and Nate and Loukee and Lakie
And Uncle Jack and Reddy and Davy and Molly and Larry
We are all together again
And we are sitting in the yard on First Street
Or maybe in the garden in the back on Centerview Drive
We are all alive
And most of us are restless
And a few deeply depressed
And the old people ache and are mostly silent
And the children are few
And one of them wants to hide
And get away from it all.

And with all of us alive

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poem by Shalom Freedman
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Have I Lost The 'Visionary Gleam?

HAVE I LOST ‘THE VISIONARY GLEAM?

Have I lost the ‘visionary gleam’?
Did I ever have it?
Is Death ‘luckier than we’ think
Or ‘lucky’ at all?
How supreme can a fiction be?
And whoever really has drunk ‘the milk’ of paradise?
Why should a rose be sick or dead?
And why should ‘patience to prevent that murmur reply’?
Who said ‘The glory of God is davka in dappled things?
And what kind of fool compares what he builds to what ‘birds build’?

Can a skeptic be a poet in a real way?
Can poetry be read by those who doubt the truth of its lines?
Wasn’t he who said beauty is truth and truth beauty dying and lying at the same time?
What does it mean to steal a line of someone else‘s great beauty
And turn it into one’s own petty gripe?

Poetry is better served by the real thing,

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poem by Shalom Freedman
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The History Poems Have Not Been Written

The history poems have not been written
The poems after Milosz
The Wallace Stevens poems will never be written
I can’t come close
I have tried the Blake poems
But of course I am not near them either
I would like to the ironic intellectual poems
I might be able to do them
I could do a kind of surrealistic association mind poem a prose poem
But I don’t like that very much
The poems of Jerusalem have not been good enough
Poems of propaganda are awkward and unacceptable
The small poems that tell of my life
They are for me the chance at real poetry
And I will continue as best I can with them
The American poems I have not yet found the idiom for
I can be epigrammatic in Emerson Thoreau fashion
But not with the hard New England observing eye
Borges poems I love
And the stories of mind and literature

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poem by Shalom Freedman
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Reasons For My Depression

REASONS FOR MY DEPRESSION

I know this weight this inertia
I know this sense of being drawn down
I know this feeling that nothing can be done
That I can do nothing
I know this sense of threat
A war might come and the enemy missiles make our cities burn
My loved ones might be in danger
I know this fear of being abandoned
Of our people facing another disaster
Wandering in homelessness
I know this feeling of being able to go nowhere
I know this feeling of never being able to get out of it
I know the tiredness and the indifference
I know my sense that I have wasted my life and work is not worth anything
The taxman is coming
The money is running out
There are more unanticipated expenses
When I just do not have it

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poem by Shalom Freedman
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