[Newspoetry] October 8 Kaddish

[DL Emerick]

Those who track my thinking,
which is to say my writing,
which is to say my interests
in being, and its betterment,
will have noted, possibly,
if they were paying attention,
which is the only pay I want,
paying heed to my thinking,
but not as any payment to me,
that I failed a final Kaddish,
the one falling a year later,
a year after a death of love,
a death opening onto a void,
a void left behind by death,
in the life of anyone caring
about a life that disappeared,
no matter what traces it left,
while living and opposing death,
living against unknowable death,
thinking against ways of death,
how to celebrate life and living.

Gloomy, surely, are such remarks,
hinting of folly, a celebration,
when all such celebrations end,
and cerebralations curdle, sour,
lands of milky ways, my honeys,
unless something saved is traced,
upon the vast memory of the heart,
so much that it becomes a ritual,
an inheritance familial, social,
the passing on of a way of life,
an event that defines a people,
and not merely an incident lost
in a hither and thither of life,
that simply reacts to each crisis,
unable to enter night in praise,
unable to wake each day singing.

I failed a final Kaddish, indeed,
I seek atonement this holy day,
which is not marked on a calendar,
though I alone hold all days holy,
and pour out holy waters in words,
every blessing and baptising them,
or anointing them with my oils,
painting them up, by my colors.

I confess, oh Derrida, I failed
to say my final Kaddish for you,
because I was out in a wildness,
a wilderness without any maps,
for lands of living are unknown,
the ab-original jungles of Eden,
where we pursue our happinesses,
and are set upon by oppositions,
some being natural, others hateful,
both alike in being to us hurtful,
but the unknown country calls us
in ways that settled lands do not.

So, there was I, on 2005 October 8,
out in the wilderness, struggling,
to find myself a new way of living,
and new ones to have living with,
in sharing whatever living comes.
It's no excuse for failing my duty,
and so I offer this late atonement,
knowing that only I can forgive me
for being alive and forgetting you,
as I was for getting something else.