What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our fourth series, Object Lessons, poets meditate on the magical journey from object to poem via one of their own poems. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.
In honor of the Eternal One, it has been made, this band and cloak, by the young and dignified girl, Simhah, daughter of the cantor, Joseph Hay, son of the wise and noble Isaac.
—1761, Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, Paris
The hunger is for the word between us, between outside and in, between Europe and America, between the Jew and his other, the word and the non-word.
In the museum case, belief has been sealed behind glass. The gold Yod, fist-shaped with extended finger, marks where the letter is made free, davar twining aleph into thing.
The hunger was once for textured cloth, brocade of thread, gold-webbed damask, tessellate fringe, for sewn-in weight of lead or brass, the chanter lifting all heaviness from the page, singing out
lost richness. He followed the gold yod of divining, alchemic word intoning the throne’s measure in discarded lexicons of cubits and myriads. The cloth lay over Europe’s open scroll between Athens and Jerusalem,
between library and dream. What if Athens were to be entered only via the syllogism or Jerusalem’s sky were written over in fiery labyrinth, in severe figures, unerring texts? The hunger was for the lost world
that lay between Jerusalem and Athens. Later, terrors came to be its portion, flames beyond remonstrance, synagogue and worshiper in ash. Celan in the Seine with its syllabary. The words were as burls in woven cloth.
They lie across the lettered scroll, ink on paper enveloped in darkness, desperate to be inmixed with matter. The words were between us, poised to rise into constellated night as task unto the city,
to enter this place unshielded between the One and nothingness, if only to exist as from an echo between hope and horror, between sacred sound and profane air. Between Athens and Jerusalem and America.
"When I first saw the bandelette in the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, in Paris’s Marais district, I immediately experienced one of those Rilkean “bursts,” for here was an object, that in its ornate yet near-transparent being, invoked so much of the social, cultural and historic struggles of the Jews which are writ large across and infuse the whole of Western culture from earliest times through the rise of Christianity and the Church fathers, on up to the Shoah."
"In Greece in the eighth century B.C., Homer began composing an epic poem, The Odyssey, which would become one of history’s most influential pieces of literature. More than a millennia later, the classic has been translated into American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time—by a St. Mary’s University graduate student."
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