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Salakh

a Hebrew keyboard
The irony of this poem is
That I am 
Exhausted by words.
 
Slavish, ephemeral sounds
Carried over ether,
Etched nowhere,
Not even upon the heart.
 
Swaddled in my tallis,
Amid 100 birthing cries,
Prone, I lay,
Breathing the scent of soil:
The ancestors.
 
Adamah washes away
A mouthful of summer-fallowed words.
What I have come to crave is the solid.
With soiled hands of an earthly potter, 
I sweep away flaked remnants of hope,
That utterances alone 
Are powerful enough for human creation.
My hands shall deliver a vessel of clay.
A seal,
Fused with the power of Eish,
Consecration branded into its body: 
Salakh.
 
On these cool autumn days,
As Ruakh once whispered rakhamim
Above a landscape of chaos,
I, in kind,
Exhale depleted letters
Of a departed vision,
Calmly watching them drift,
Settle,
And come to rest.

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