Fireflies
In the dry summer field at nightfall,
fireflies rise like sparks.
Imagine the presence of ghosts
flickering, the ghosts of young friends,
your father nearest in the distance.
This time they carry no sorrow,
no remorse, their presence is so light.
Childhood comes to you,
memories of your street in lamplight,
holding those last moments before bed,
capturing lightning-bugs,
with a blossom of the hand
letting them go. Lightness returns,
an airy motion over the ground
you remember from Ring Around the Rosie.
If you stay, the fireflies become fireflies
again, not part of your stories,
as unaware of you as sleep, being
beautiful and quiet all around you.
Saying Goodbye
We embraced, there in the parking lot
of the ordinary.
How could I know your arms were arguing last things?
Your cheek in my hair.
For a moment, I pressed against you. Goodbyes can be vast.
In a breath, we traded lives. I didn’t know you
were a cliff I had reached the edge of.
Your touch echoed.
I simply followed it like song.
Passover
My father heads our table,
his cheeks flushed from the first cup of wine.
At sunset he left his wallet upstairs
with bags of quarters from the vending machines.
He’s making jokes and laughing with his mouth shut,
giving us his bright side—boy, clown, inventor.
Tonight by candlelight even the sullen teenagers
are cheerful, my sister Elaine and I,
glowing from apples and walnuts soaked in wine
Aunt Marilyn is alive, sitting across from me.
Her breasts are hers again, untouched by cancer.
The New York Grandma is beside her
in a cotton housedress, two lines of berry lipstick
pressed on her faded mouth.
She’s laughing, “Oy, stop it, Harry!” as my father
teases her. Letting go of want and pogroms.
My mother is no longer a martyr.
Pharoah has set her free so she can recline,
tasting her frothy matzoh balls,
delighting in all she has created.
This is Passover, an invitation
to our freer selves to join us,
an invitation to the poor to come and dine.
My father loved kids, especially poor ones,
seeing himself starving back in Brooklyn.
He liked to buy ice cream for any hungry child
he found hanging around the stand.
The prayer book tells us, “The dead shall live on earth
in the good deeds they performed here,
and in the memory of those who live after them.”
That’s it, no big party, though this evening
circulating like sad music in the fragrant air
all the Jews who ever lived are still alive.
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Marilyn Kallet’s latest poetry book is Even When We Sleep, from Black Widow Press, 2022. She has published 18 other books, including How Our Bodies Learned, The Love That Moves Me and Packing Light: New and Selected Poems. She translated Paul Eluard’s Last Love Poems and Péret’s The Big Game. Dr. Kallet served two terms as Knoxville Poet Laureate, June 27, 2018-June 2020. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Tennessee. For two decades, she has led poetry groups in Auvillar, France, for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poetry has appeared in Plume; North American Review and Potomac Review, among others.
“Fireflies” appears in Packing Light: New and Selected Poems, Black Widow Press, 2009. In addition it was published in The New York Times, “Poetry Pairing,” August 5, 2010, as selected by U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser.
“Saying Goodbye” appears in How to Get Heat Without Fire, 1996; Packing Light: New and Selected Poems, Black Widow Press, 2009. In addition, it was set to music by Tom Cipullo: song cycle entitled “How To Get Heat Without Fire,” in Song of America, 2000. https://songofamerica.net/song/saying-goodbye/.
Passover appears in How to Get Heat Without Fire, New Messenger Writings, 1996. It was reprinted in Packing Light: New and Selected Poems, Black Widow Press, 2009.