Two Poems - PROTOCOLS

i have spent my life striving

to become a man

wading in Your words

pulling the chariot of Your deeds

but the worms did not come from my skin

and the mountain and desert

were not really dry land

but the sites of a familiar

cynical (cyclical) drowning

the boneyard is all that is left of me now

but in the place of abandoned human beings,

there is a new parchment unfurling

the length of our bodies

the width of unkept imaginations

this is the Torah of bereaved shedding

an un-Assembly

the beauty of all our unspun burdens

Bonnie Schertz, Mizocz Women, Poland, 1942: a collaboration, 2018. Silkscreened photograph on cotton, muslin backing, unspun wool, metallic and novelty threads, floss, eyelets, wire and beads using surface embroidery, beading, stump work techniques. The accompanying copper pipe piece: Bonnie Schertz and John Giraldi, This is What Remains, copper plumbing wire, 2018. Photo: John Giraldi.

II.

the sages

played cards

but unbeknownst to the masters

their path was a pot

(the eye, a friend, a neighbour, the heart)

and as they gambled, women spent nearly six thousand years

climbing out the inside of pockets

finding what precedes dust and ash has always been Jewish women’s work

Devon Spier is a writer and rabbinical student at the Academy for Jewish Religion in New York.

Bonnie Schertz is an artist and lawyer living in New York City. She uses embroidery, knitting, crochet and paint with various media to explore and express how the body illuminates our humanness and humanity.