Poem During the Plague: Poem 21

The Pink April Moon of Passover 2020

By Rosie Rosenzweig

This is the moon of our affliction,

Rippled and round like hand-made matzo,

True to the turning of the season.

The day before we declared and opened our doors:

“Let all who are hungry come and eat.”

No one answered from our empty suburban streets.

But the clouds hung low as they floated

Above my window, brightly resonating

The radiant chants and pleas of our yearly ritual.

I still hungered for a fierce new diurnal to open the stubborn sea to me.

****   Rosie Rosenzweig, a Resident Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women's Studies   Research Center, has just published her poetry book Bring Me into Flesh (Ibbetson Press), which includes poems from the first Jewish egalitarian prayer book in the United States, and from her experiences as a meditation teacher.  Her travel memoir A Jewish Mother in Shangri-la (Shambhala Publications), describes travelling through America, France, India, and Nepal to meet her Buddhist son’s Buddhist teachers and receive transmissions from them.  Her play, Myths & Ms. dramatizes the relationship between reincarnation and abortion, Her latest book, Emergence: the Role of Mindfulness in Creativity, describing the parallels between the state of Flow and meditation, will be published next month.