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For Waking

A woman with grey hair and glasses reads a book outside on a sunny day, wearing a mask and a pink scarf.
I’m searching for words
to describe this year,
 
language spacious enough
to encircle, enfold
 
all we’ve seen,
feared and loved,
 
lost and learned, all
we’ve changed.
 
I’m sifting through blessings,
too many to choose from:
 
good health, beriut,
wisdom, da’at,
 
tikvah, hope
when the house is so quiet
 
I must remind it
to breathe. It’s not alone.
 
Letters arrive, children’s drawings
and poems, gatherings on Zoom.
 
Zoom funerals.
The house, porous vessel,
 
fills with tears.
But there are stirrings.
 
Robins and pigeons, another
word for doves, hover
 
on branches, not yet
green. They sing
 
flight calls, stories of their long journeys
and return. So I,
 
thin-skinned, porous vessel,
will wash myself in gratitude
 
and sing modah ani
in this complicated moment,
 
grateful for waking,
for my soul.
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