The Hunger Moon

by Marge Piercy

was born—before it failed—

  when I was beautiful.

  Whatever you are

  I’ve won a blessing from you.”

  The angel, “Yes, we have met

  at doors thrust open to an empty room,

  a garden, or a pit.

  My gifts have human faces

  hieroglyphs that command

  you without yielding what they mean.

  Cast yourself and I will bless your cast

  till your bones are dice

  for the wind to roll.

  I am the demon of beginnings

  for those who leap their thresholds

  and let the doors swing shut.”

  My hair bristling, I stood.

  “Get away from me, old

  enemy. I know the lying

  radiance of that face:

  my lover I trusted as the fish

  the water, who left me

  carrying his child.

  The man who bought me

  with his strength and beat

  me for his weakness.

  The girl I saved who turned

  and sold her skin

  for an easy bed in a house

  of slaves. The boy fresh

  as a willow sapling

  smashed on the stones of war.”

  “I am the spirit of hinges,

  the fever that lives in dice

  and cards, what is picked

  up and thrown down. I am

  the new that is ancient,

  the hope that hurts,

  what begins in what has ended.

  Mine is the double vision

  that everything is sacred, and trivial,

  and I love the blue beetle

  clicking in the grass as much

  as you. Shall I bless you

  child and crone?”

  “What has plucked the glossy

  pride of hair from my scalp,

  loosened my teeth in their sockets

  wrung my breasts dry as gullies,

  rubbed ashes into my sleep

  but chasing you?

  Now I clutch a crust and I hold on.

  Get from me

  wielder of the heart’s mirages.

  I will follow you to no more graves.”

  I spat

  and she gathered her tall shuddering wings

  and scaled the streaks of dawn

  a hawk on fire soaring

  and I stood there and could hear the water

  burbling and raised my hand

  before my face and groped:

  What has the sun gone out?

  Why is it dark?

  For each age, its amulet

  Each illness has its demon, burning you with

  its fever, beating its quick wings.

  Do not leave an infant alone in the house,

  my grandmother said, for Lilith is hovering,

  hungry. Avoid sleeping in a new house alone.

  Demons come to death as flies do, hanging

  on the sour sweetish wind. Protect yourself

  in an unclean place by spitting three times.

  A pregnant woman must go to bed with a knife.

  Put iron in a hen’s nest to keep it laying.

  Demons suck eggs and squeeze the breath from chicks.

  Circle yourself with salt and pray.

  By building containers of plutonium

  with the power to kill for longer than humans

  have walked upright, demons are driven off.

  Demons lurk in dark skins, white skins,

  demons speak another language, have funny hair.

  Very fast planes that fall from the sky

  regularly like ostriches trying to fly, protect.

  Best of all is the burning of money ritually

  in the pentagon shaped shrine. In Langley

  the largest prayer wheel computer recites spells

  composed of all words written, spoken, thought

  taped and stolen from every person alive.

  Returning to the cemetery in the old Prague ghetto

  Like bad teeth jammed crooked in a mouth

  I think, no, because it goes on and on,

  rippling in uneven hillocks among the linden

  trees drooping, their papery leaves piling

  up in the narrow paths that thread

  between the crowded tilting slabs.

  Stone pages the wind blew open.

  The wind petrified into individual

  cries. Prisoners penned together

  with barely room to stand upright.

  Souls of the dead Jews of Prague

  waiting for justice under the acid rain.

  So much and no further shall you go,

  your contaminated dead confined between

  strait walls like the ghetto itself.

  So what to do? Every couple of generations,

  pile on the dirt, raise the stones up

  and add another layer of fresh bones.

  The image I circle and do not want:

  naked pallid bodies whipped through

  the snow and driven into the chamber,

  so crowded that dying slowly in the poison

  cloud they could not fall as their nerves

  burned slowly black, upright in death.

  In my luggage I carried from Newcomb Hollow

  two stones for Rabbi Loew’s memorial

  shaped like a narrow tent, one for Judah

  on his side and one for Perl on hers.

  But my real gift is the novel they

  speak through. For David Gans, astronomer,

  geographer, historian, insatiably curious

  and neat as a cat in his queries,

  I brought a fossil to lay at the foot

  of his grave marked with a goose and a star,

  Mogen David, so the illiterate could find

  him, as Judah has his rampant lion.

  In ’68 I had to be hoisted

  over the fence. Among the stones

  I was alone except for a stray black cat

  that sang to me incessantly of need,

  so hungry it ate bread from my jacket pocket.

  This year buses belch out German tourists

  and the graves are well tended.

  This is a place history clutches you

  by the foot as you walk the human earth,

  like a hand grabbing from the grave,

  not to frighten but to admonish.

  Remember. History is the iron

  in your blood carrying oxygen

  so you can burn food and live.

  Read this carved book with your fingers

  and your failing eyes. The language

  will speak in you silently

  nights afterward, stone and bone.

  The fundamental truth

  The Christian right, Islamic Jihad,

  the Jewish right bank settlers bringing

  the Messiah down, the Japanese sects

  who worship by bombing subways,

  they all hate each other

  but more they hate the mundane,

  ordinary people who love living

  more than dying in radiant glory,

  who shuffle and sigh and make supper.

  They need a planet of their own,

  perhaps even a barren moon

  with artificial atmosphere,

  where they will surely be nearer

  to their gods and their fiercest

  enemies, where they can kill

  to their heart’s peace

  kill to the last standing man

  and leave the rest of us be.

  Not mystics to whom the holy

  comes in the core of struggle

  in a shimmer of blinding quiet,

  not scholars haggling out the inner

  meaning of gnarly ancient sentences.

  No, the holy comes to these zealots

  as a license to kill, for self doubt

  and humility have dr
ied like mud

  under their marching feet.

  They have far more in common

  with each other, these braggarts

  of hatred, the iron hearted

  in whose ear a voice spoke

  once and left them deaf.

  Their faith is founded on death

  of others, and everyone is other

  to them, whose Torah, Bible and Koran

  are splattered in letters of blood.

  Amidah: on our feet we speak to you

  We rise to speak

  a web of bodies aligned like notes of music.

  1.

  Bless what brought us through

  the sea and the fire; we are caught

  in history like whales in polar ice.

  Yet you have taught us to push against the walls,

  to reach out and pull each other along,

  to strive to find the way through

  if there is no way around, to go on.

  To utter ourselves with every breath

  against the constriction of fear,

  to know ourselves as the body born from Abraham

  and Sarah, born out of rock and desert.

  We reach back through two hundred arches of hips

  long dust, carrying their memories inside us

  to live again in our life, Issac and Rebecca,

  Rachel, Jacob, Leah. We say words shaped

  by ancient use like steps worn into rock.

  2.

  Bless the quiet of sleep

  easing over the ravaged body, that quiets

  the troubled waters of the mind to a pool

  in which shines the placid broad face of the moon.

  Bless the teaching of how to open

  in love so all the doors and windows of the body

  swing wide on their rusty hinges

  and we give ourselves with both hands.

  Bless what stirs in us compassion

  for the hunger of the chickadee in the storm

  starving for seeds we can carry out,

  the wounded cat wailing in the alley,

  that shows us our face in a stranger,

  that teaches us what we clutch shrivels

  but what we give goes off in the world

  carrying bread to people not yet born.

  Bless the gift of memory

  that breaks unbidden, released

  from a flower or a cup of tea

  so the dead move like rain through the room.

  Bless what forces us to invent

  goodness every morning and what never frees

  us from the cost of knowledge, which is

  to act on what we know again and again.

  3.

  All living are one and holy, let us remember

  as we eat, as we work, as we walk and drive.

  All living are one and holy, we must make ourselves worthy.

  We must act out justice and mercy and healing

  as the sun rises and as the sun sets,

  as the moon rises and the stars wheel above us,

  we must repair goodness.

  We must praise the power of the one that joins us.

  Whether we plunge in or thrust ourselves far out

  finally we reach the face of glory too bright

  for our eyes and yet we burn and we give light.

  We will try to be holy,

  we will try to repair the world given us to hand on.

  Precious is this treasure of words and knowledge and deeds

  that moves inside us.

  Holy is the hand that works for peace and for justice,

  holy is the mouth that speaks for goodness

  holy is the foot that walks toward mercy.

  Let us lift each other on our shoulders and carry each other along.

  Let holiness move in us.

  Let us pay attention to its small voice.

  Let us see the light in others and honor that light.

  Remember the dead who paid our way here dearly, dearly

  and remember the unborn for whom we build our houses.

  Praise the light that shines before us, through us, after us,

  Amein.

  Kaddish

  Look around us, search above us, below, behind.

  We stand in a great web of being joined together.

  Let us praise, let us love the life we are lent

  passing through us in the body of Israel

  and our own bodies, let’s say amein.

  Time flows through us like water.

  The past and the dead speak through us.

  We breathe out our children’s children, blessing.

  Blessed is the earth from which we grow,

  Blessed the life we are lent,

  blessed the ones who teach us,

  blessed the ones we teach,

  blessed is the word that cannot say the glory

  that shines through us and remains to shine

  flowing past distant suns on the way to forever.

  Let’s say amein.

  Blessed is light, blessed is darkness,

  but blessed above all else is peace

  which bears the fruits of knowledge

  on strong branches, let’s say amein.

  Peace that bears joy into the world,

  peace that enables love, peace over Israel

  everywhere, blessed and holy is peace, let’s say amein.

  Wellfleet Shabbat

  The hawk eye of the sun slowly shuts.

  The breast of the bay is softly feathered

  dove grey. The sky is barred like the sand

  when the tide trickles out.

  The great doors of Shabbat are swinging

  open over the ocean, loosing the moon

  floating up slow distorted vast, a copper

  balloon just sailing free.

  The wind slides over the waves, patting

  them with its giant hand, and the sea

  stretches its muscles in the deep,

  purrs and rolls over.

  The sweet beeswax candles flicker

  and sigh, standing between the phlox

  and the roast chicken. The wine shines

  its red lantern of joy.

  Here on this piney sandspit, the Shekinah

  comes on the short strong wings of the seaside

  sparrow raising her song and bringing

  down the fresh clean night.

  The head of the year

  The moon is dark tonight, a new

  moon for a new year. It is

  hollow and hungers to be full.

  It is the black zero of beginning.

  Now you must void yourself

  of injuries, insults, incursions.

  Go with empty hands to those

  you have hurt and make amends.

  It is not too late. It is early

  and about to grow. Now

  is the time to do what you

  know you must and have feared

  to begin. Your face is dark

  too as you turn inward to face

  yourself, the hidden twin

  of all you must grow to be.

  Forgive the dead year. Forgive

  yourself. What will be wants

  to push through your fingers.

  The light you seek hides

  in your belly. The light you

  crave longs to stream from

  your eyes. You are the moon

  that will wax in new goodness.

  Breadcrumbs

  Some time on Rosh Hashana I go,

  a time dictated by tide charts,

  services. The once I did tashlich

  on the rising tide and the crumbs

  came back to me, my energy soured,

  vinegar of anxiety. Now I eye the times.

  I choose the dike, where the Herring River

  pours in and out of the bay, where at

  low tide in September blue herons stalk

  totemic to spear
the alewives hastening

  silver-sided from the fresh ponds to

  the sea. As I toss my crumbs, muttering

  prayers, a fisherman rebukes me: It’s

  not right to feed the fish, it distracts

  them from his bait. Sometimes it’s

  odd to be a Jew, like a three-

  legged heron with bright purple head,

  an ibis in white plumes diving

  except that with global warming

  we do sometimes glimpse an ibis

  in our marshes, and I am rooted here

  to abide the winter when this tourist

  has gone back to Cincinnati.

  My rituals are mated to this fawn

  colored land floating on the horizon

  of water. My havurah calls itself

  Am haYam, people of the sea,

  and we are wedded to the oceans

  as truly as the Venetian doge who tossed

  his gold ring to the Adriatic.

  All rivers flow at last into the sea

  but here it is, at once. So we stand

  the tourist casting for his fish

  and I tossing my bread. The fish

  snap it up at once. Tonight perhaps

  he will broil my sins for supper.

  The New Year of the Trees

  It is the New Year of the Trees, but here

  the ground is frozen under the crust of snow.

  The trees snooze, their buds tight as nuts.

  Rhododendron leaves roll up their stiff scrolls.

  In the white and green north of the diaspora

  I am stirred by a season that will not arrive

  for six weeks, as wines on far continents prickle

  to bubbles when their native vines bloom.

  What blossoms here are birds jostling

  at feeders, pecking sunflower seeds

  and millet through the snow: tulip red