RELEASE

Indian summer: fat bees alight
on goldenrod and clover.
The crickets in our backyard
chitter their endless song.

Like the cat, I wouldn't mind
curling up in a patch of sun.
But every sound I hear
becomes a shofar blasting

awake from your sleep!
Time to stretch spiritual muscles
too-long unused, to extend
like a leggy weed.

Inside every shrunken husk
is a spark of holiness, seed
of a world still waiting
to be born. Crack me open.

This week's prompt at ReadWritePoem is a cluster of words. I fit four of them into this short poem, which is (not surprisingly) on seasonal themes. As we move through the last few days of 5769, everything reminds me of the impending holidays.

There's a kabbalistic teaching that the world we know is filled with sparks of holiness, remnants from a cataclysmic shattering at the moment of creation. In the Hasidic understanding, our job is to find the sparks of God hidden in the husks of materiality and to uplift them one by one. In so doing, we participate in the redemption of all things.

Of course, as autumn continues to race toward us headlong (in my hemisphere), the notion of a seed hidden in a withered husk takes on physical resonance as well as spiritual resonance. So this poem ends with an image meant to partake in both of those sets of ideas.

ETA: You can read other people's responses to this prompt at this week's Get Your Poem On post.

[release.mp3]