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Best Famous Shul Poems

Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Shul poems. This is a select list of the best famous Shul poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Shul poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of shul poems.

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Written by Marilyn Hacker | Create an image from this poem

Desesperanto

 After Joseph Roth

Parce que c'était lui; parce que c'était moi.
Montaigne, De L'amitië The dream's forfeit was a night in jail and now the slant light is crepuscular.
Papers or not, you are a foreigner whose name is always difficult to spell.
You pack your one valise.
You ring the bell.
Might it not be prudent to disappear beneath that mauve-blue sky above the square fronting your cosmopolitan hotel? You know two short-cuts to the train station which could get you there, on foot, in time.
The person who's apprised of your intention and seems to be your traveling companion is merely the detritus of a dream.
You cross the lobby and go out alone.
You crossed the lobby and went out alone through the square, where two red-headed girls played hopscotch on a chalk grid, now in the shade, of a broad-leafed plane tree, now in the sun.
The lively, lovely, widowed afternoon disarmed, uncoupled, shuffled and disarrayed itself; despite itself, dismayed you with your certainties, your visa, gone from your breast-pocket, or perhaps expired.
At the reception desk, no one inquired if you'd be returning.
Now you wonder why.
When the stout conductor comes down the aisle mustached, red-faced, at first jovial, and asks for your passport, what will you say? When they ask for your passport, will you say that town's name they'd find unpronounceable which resonates, when uttered, like a bell in your mind's tower, as it did the day you carried your green schoolbag down the gray fog-cobbled street, past church, bakery, shul past farm women setting up market stalls it was so early.
"I am on my way to school in .
" You were part of the town now, not the furnished rooms you shared with Mutti, since the others disappeared.
Your knees were red with cold; your itchy wool socks had inched down, so you stooped to pull them up, a student and a citizen.
You are a student and a citizen of whatever state is transient.
You are no more or less the resident of a hotel than you were of that town whose borders were disputed and redrawn.
A prince conceded to a president.
Another language became relevant to merchants on that street a child walked down whom you remember, in the corridors of cities you inhabit, polyglot as the distinguished scholar you were not to be.
A slight accent sets you apart, but it would mark you on that peddlers'-cart street now.
Which language, after all, is yours? Which language, after all these streets, is yours, and why are you here, waiting for a train? You could have run a hot bath, read Montaigne.
But would footsteps beyond the bathroom door's bolt have disturbed the nondescript interior's familiarity, shadowed the plain blue draperies? You reflect, you know no one who would, of you, echo your author's "Because it was he; because it was I," as a unique friendship's non sequitur.
No footsteps and no friend: that makes you free.
The train approaches, wreathed in smoke like fur around the shoulders of a dowager with no time for sentimentality.
With no time for sentimentality, mulling a twice-postponed book-review, you take an empty seat.
Opposite you a voluble immigrant family is already unwrapping garlicky sausages—an unshaven man and his two red-eared sons.
You once wrote: it is true, awful, and unimportant, finally that if the opportunity occurs some of the exiles become storm-troopers; and you try, culpably, to project these three into some torch-lit future, filtering out their wrangling (one of your languages) about the next canto in their short odyssey.
The next canto in your short odyssey will open, you know this, in yet another hotel room.
They have become your mother country: benevolent anonymity of rough starched sheets, dim lamp, rickety escritoire, one window.
Your neighbors gather up their crusts and rinds.
Out of a leather satchel, the man takes their frayed identity cards, examines them.
The sons watch, pale and less talkative.
A border, passport control, draw near: rubber stamp or interrogation? You hope the customs officer lunched well; reflect on the recurrent implication of the dream's forfeit.
One night in jail?


Written by Robert Pinsky | Create an image from this poem

Poem With Refrains

 The opening scene.
The yellow, coal-fed fog Uncurling over the tainted city river, A young girl rowing and her anxious father Scavenging for corpses.
Funeral meats.
The clever Abandoned orphan.
The great athletic killer Sulking in his tent.
As though all stories began With someone dying.
When her mother died, My mother refused to attend the funeral-- In fact, she sulked in her tent all through the year Of the old lady's dying.
I don't know why: She said, because she loved her mother so much She couldn't bear to see the way the doctors, Or her father, or--someone--was letting her mother die.
"Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet; Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet.
" She fogs things up, she scavenges the taint.
Possibly that's the reason I write these poems.
But they did speak: on the phone.
Wept and argued, So fiercely one or the other often cut off A sentence by hanging up in rage--like lovers, But all that year she never saw her face.
They lived on the same block, four doors apart.
"Absence my presence is; strangeness my grace; With them that walk against me is my sun.
" "Synagogue" is a word I never heard, We called it shul, the Yiddish word for school.
Elms, terra-cotta, the ocean a few blocks east.
"Lay institution": she taught me we didn't think God lived in it.
The rabbi is just a teacher.
But what about the hereditary priests, Descendants of the Cohanes of the Temple, Like Walter Holtz--I called him Uncle Walter, When I was small.
A big man with a face Just like a boxer dog or a cartoon sergeant.
She told me whenever he helped a pretty woman Try on a shoe in his store, he'd touch her calf And ask her, "How does that feel?" I was too little To get the point but pretended to understand.
"Desire, be steady; hope is your delight, An orb wherein no creature can ever be sorry.
" She didn't go to my bar mitzvah, either.
I can't say why: she was there, and then she wasn't.
I looked around before I mounted the steps To chant that babble and the speech the rabbi wrote And there she wasn't, and there was Uncle Walter The Cohane frowning with his doggy face: "She's missing her own son's musaf.
" Maybe she just Doesn't like rituals.
Afterwards, she had a reason I don't remember.
I wasn't upset: the truth Is, I had decided to be the clever orphan Some time before.
By now, it's all a myth.
What is a myth but something that seems to happen Always for the first time over and over again? And ten years later, she missed my brother's, too.
I'm sorry: I think it was something about a hat.
"Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air, Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair; Shine, sun; burn, fire; breathe, air, and ease me.
" She sees the minister of the Nation of Islam On television, though she's half-blind in one eye.
His bow tie is lime, his jacket crocodile green.
Vigorously he denounces the Jews who traded in slaves, The Jews who run the newspapers and the banks.
"I see what this guy is mad about now," she says, "It must have been some Jew that sold him the suit.
" "And the same wind sang and the same wave whitened, And or ever the garden's last petals were shed, In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened.
" But when they unveiled her mother's memorial stone, Gathered at the graveside one year after the death, According to custom, while we were standing around About to begin the prayers, her car appeared.
It was a black car; the ground was deep in snow.
My mother got out and walked toward us, across The field of gravestones capped with snow, her coat Black as the car, and they waited to start the prayers Until she arrived.
I think she enjoyed the drama.
I can't remember if she prayed or not, But that may be the way I'll remember her best: Dark figure, awaited, attended, aware, apart.
"The present time upon time passëd striketh; With Phoebus's wandering course the earth is graced.
The air still moves, and by its moving, cleareth; The fire up ascends, and planets feedeth; The water passeth on, and all lets weareth; The earth stands still, yet change of changes breedeth.
"

Book: Reflection on the Important Things