Ode to my tefillin (for Big Tent Poetry)
April 13, 2011
ODE TO MY TEFILLIN
Six years in
you still smell like leather.
I don't touch you
often enough, don't
let my fingers peruse
your velvet nest
but when I manage
to bind my arm
and hang your light
on my forehead
I can almost feel
what spirals through me.
I have to trust
God remembers our vows
even when I don't make time
to slip you on, string
around my finger
ring around my heart.
There's another week's worth of poetry prompts at Big Tent Poetry this week, one of which is Write an ode to a prized physical object. As soon as I saw that prompt, I knew what I wanted to write about... and as soon as I put the object in question on, the poem flowed.
(If you're here via Big Tent Poetry and are perhaps unfamiliar with tefillin, here are a few posts which might be helpful: Connections and Surprises -- about my impulse to buy myself tefillin, and about the surprise of being gifted with a pair -- and, while I'm at it, here's my Mother psalm 7, written in sumer 2010, which begins "Don't chew on your mama's tefillin...")
Here's a link to this week's Come One, Come All post so you can see how others responded to this week's Big Tent Poetry prompts.