Ashkenazi Poems | Examples

Before I start this poem, I seek
To acknowledge that I sit on the land of the Wequaeesgeek
And that my laptop, at which I peer through thick glasses
drowns islands in the Pacific with greenhouse gases.

I know life has always given me the edge
Due to my Jewish Ashkenazi privilege.
And being male I'm in the patriarchy
At the top of the oppressive hierarchy.

I apologize for my pronoun being 'he'
At least it could have been 'they' or 'we'.
I apologize that all these apologies are fake
And for the real apologies that I didn't make.

Now back to my poem, it occurred at night
I can't let that idea fade, take flight
I didn't have a pen; I should have written it quick
I've lost the thread and now I feel sick.

  Whether secular, religious, or 'just-let-me-be'
    Sefardi, Ethiopian, or Ashkenazi

  90% of my fellow Israelis agree
    today in Israel there's 110% unity

  Behind this statistic lies an amazing fact:
  
  For 75 years now, the 'Who is a Jew' question's been asked
    yet no definitive answer, Israel's lawmakers not up to the task

  So how the devil can our sworn enemies wipe us all out
    If they don't know who 'we' are, how can they put 'us' to rout

Some languages are fluently translatable
but only by how the mouth
utters and shapes them,
they are too musical to be not sung,
like Gaelic; it was my mother’s tongue
and her grandmother’s elder tongue.

Romani is acoustically spell-binding,
Grandfather was a gypsy
horses naturally understood his voice;
it’s an Indo-Aryan root language
like Yiddish, a colloquial melodia
in Ashkenazi/Aramaic.

My own genetically challenged branch
of a familial tree of tongues
is half-Jewish  – the wrong half.

These lips follow only English,
a language with too many roots,
its tongues are all blended into
a raucous silence.
There are many multilingual wounds
and they all bleed like dark treacle
out of a hide-bound dictionary.

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