Five Poems by Zohar Atkins
PN Review 233, January - February 2017
The Binding of Isaac
Twenty minutes away, a young Muslim is dying of bone cancer
In an Israeli hospital. His sister refuses to donate her marrow
And the young man cries out in darkness, ‘Allah, Merciful One, I know
You are punishing me for all those naked women I visited.’
And under his rage is the sadness of tank-ploughed olive groves.
We read about it in our seminar and debate the pros and cons
Of hugging him. We refer to human touch as an intervention.
‘Who are you to love me?’ We hear our fantasies shout back at us.
And so it was that Abraham, having heard the angel’s voice
And felt her tears, untied his only son, saying, ‘God has provided
The offering for us.’ But Ishmael insisted Avraham had heard wrong
And said, ‘My place is here, on the altar.’ And Abraham said, ‘Isaac, Isaac.’
And Ishmael said, ‘Hineini.’
Seeker’s Psalm
And Dinah, daughter of Leah,
little girl of Jacob, went out to look
upon the daughters of the land.
(Gen. 38:4)
Our God and God of our ancestors,
have we not also gone out to find ourselves
amongst the peoples of the world?
Have we not also left our parents’ homes
in search of old questions and new light?
What was Dinah seeking when she was seen
by Shechem ben Hamor?
What image of you formed in her eyes
before she was taken by him –
taken first by force and then by love?
God who lifts mountains
over us
so we may accept your shadow
God who mines order from chaos
music from noise
struggle from conformity
God who leads us
astray
to a place we will show you
Keep us as you kept Dinah –
in the palace of Shechem
so even here
far from our origins
we may stay
Yisrael
Déjà Vu
Tell me the absence of helicopters, there
In winter blue, above the bridge, isn’t
Significant – that the upside-down sign
Advertising a world at No Additional Fees
Isn’t meant to draw us into it.
And poems, tell me the years don’t spread,
Vainly forming a notion
Of self-worth and haggling over the boundary
Between voice and desire. Tell me this need
To hibernate isn’t language’s way of teasing
Forth from refusal. Tell me this staff, this rock,
This comma, projected into bread and blessing
Doesn’t tell us everything we need to know to morph,
To ward, to throw unknowable music: Fire, child of snow
And snow, child of gaze. Whose? Yes. That’s the point,
O chaos. So may the target of our senses and the backlog
Of our failures be acceptable to our lives that we may live
Beyond allure. Let those orange suede boots traipsing across
Your poem not dissolve your knowledge that you manifested
From a rat’s periphery. She wants to be a co-author with you,
As if you were the same as you. As if the you deciding which
Words deserve to arrive – here – were not an effect of the words
They only seem to chaperone. Tell me a truth that doesn’t
Reference Heidegger, a love whose knowledge exceeds all scope.
Descent
And Joseph saw his brothers, and knew them
And made himself strange to them
And spoke roughly to them.
(Genesis 42:7)
He made himself strange to them.
We might think this means he hid himself
But commentaries, rescued by chance
From the offal of Fallujah, and sold
On the Black Market to Collectors
From Hebrew U, tell otherwise.
At Tel Aviv, they say this is a fiction,
That the site of rescue was Leipzig, 1939.
There are wonders not even the human heart can save.
Can you imagine the entire Talmud
Burnt forever? Can you imagine not having heard
Of anything you assume makes a world?
Tree, stone, earth? ‘It was his very strangeness
That he hoped would out him,’ says Rashbam.
As if Joseph still needs us to see he’s truly Joseph,
And not Pharaoh’s double,
The guy Pharaoh will forget.
Joseph remembers who he is.
He is the only character in the Bible who weeps seven times,
Once for each day of Creation.
We thought we’d traded Joseph in for a life free of disturbance.
Now he sells us corn, but won’t take our money.
Like the kid who keeps the Monopoly game going after he’s won
By doling out handouts from the bank so his mom can keep paying him.
Meanwhile, the socialists picket, ‘Where is Zebulon’s chapter, and Naftali’s
and Yisasschar’s, and Gad’s?’ If only Benjamin could have lived a year longer,
Just to have written an essay redeeming the hanged baker.
We might have read theories suggesting
Dream interpretation was then what consulting is now.
Joseph was just looking at the numbers.
Dear Guru
Dear Guru,
source of ideation and aesthetically tested angst,
maker of all things your consumers pronounce
enlightened,
you who are beyond subject
and, let’s not kid ourselves, object,
you who are the whoopy cushion of all metaphors,
and for whom it is a sin to even say you are,
forgive me for calling on you for such a small favour,
I know you are very busy, holding on the line
with Verizon customer service. But
I do not know how to write poetry, guru.
Teach me your ways that my words
may one day ally themselves with words
that are not mine, so the language will not mock me
or bamboozle me or take me for a ride or what
have you, so I will not be the butt of language’s
cigarette anthropologists stomp on during their
lunch break. Dear guru, rescue me from the belly
of truth, in whose mouth I threw myself to hide
from you. Send me back to the Nineveh of ordinary
language, where sandwich wrappers are just
sandwich wrappers and eulogies consist entirely
of emojis. Guru, give me the wisdom you told me
I already have, if only I would lose five pounds,
or my obsession with losing weight, or my thought
or my hunger for knowledge and metaphor
and footnotes. The wisdom to stop calling
on you at such late hours. Or the wisdom to
stop calling you by your title or your middle name
(Kony? Ted? Usurpulus?) and start calling
you by your last name, which is guru
spelled backwards: urug, if only
I could pronounce it.
Zohar Atkins is a poet, rabbi and theologian, based in New York. He earned a DPhil in Theology from Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and a BA and MA from Brown. He is the author of An Ethical and Theological Appropriation of Heidegger’s Critique of Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). His poetry won an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. Other poems have appeared in New Poetries VII, Blackbox Manifold, The Glasgow Review of Books, PN Review, The Lehrhaus, TYPO, and elsewhere. Atkins is the founder of Etz Hasadeh, a Center for Existential Torah Study, and a David Hartman Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
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