How the boys loved launching from the rickety dock, even though
I insisted (responsible parent) that they wear life jackets as they rushed
in shorts and flipflops from the splintery boards into the thin-hulled
aluminum rowboat, set the oars in place, their urgency full of laughter.
Lakeside. Not for them the perspective of ocean voyages, of Vasco da Gama,
Columbus, or Amelia Earhardt up above. Thor Heyerdahl on a Pacific
raft; Lehua Kamalu, whose name tastes new to me but carries an urgency
to explore, to go forth.
Notice the care with which we tell tales to young children (navigation,
storms, albatross) full of successful adventure—easing around jagged rocks
and wreckage: the Middle Passage, the Triangle Trade, the Shoah. Yes,
later I’ll teach them how to look through paired lenses, adjust binoculars,
appreciate perspective. Free children in the land of the free, home of the brave,
how will they handle the origin stories of liberty?
Shackles. Famine. Desperation and desolation. Elsewhere, fire-bombed
neighborhoods, bare shelves in the hospitals, earthquake, hope crumbling
among heaps of crushed concrete.
I was, in that time, their Lady with a Lamp: sitting at dusk on the dock,
thumbing the biggest flashlight, making a golden path on the waters; come
home, children. Let me feed you, insist on baths, tuck you unwilling, laughing,
into cool sheets under safe ceilings. Oh America, where such evenings
survive. Oh half-grown citizens with much to face, some other night. Oh
witnesses, explorers. Be safe. Sleep.
Some other night, we will call for courage. This night: The boat safely moored
at the shadowed dock. Sweet dreams.
Photograph courtesy of the poet
This poem was generated in Ritualwell’s “Sacred Words for a Fragile Democracy: A Jewish Creative Writing Lab,” July 2026
