by Brett Rutherford
Did anything happen?
Two days of waiting,
of doing nothing,
contemplative rest.
No “creating” allowed
so as not to compete
with the solemn anniversary
of, well, the creation of everything.
Christian New Years
is nothing next to this --
some random day
observing the seeming orbit
of a planet around its sun.
They gather in crowds.
A ball drops. Then, drunk,
they all fall down.
What a bunch of schmegegge!
Now, Rosh Hashanah
is something else, no less
than the anniversary
of the universe itself.
Chaos, clouds,
the formless void,
the parting of waters,
the making of suns,
dust clotted into planets,
all of it, as counted out
on earth-days, sun years,
galactic time, gravity
and space curvature
all taken into account,
this is the birthday
of birthdays, the Big Bang’s
candle blowout. Go for it!
Did anything happen?
Two nights of candlelight
and some uneasy sleep
(like a greedy young boy
on the eve of gift-giving).
The sun is up.
Time to turn on the news.
When the clock of the cosmos
tipped up to midnight
and down to dawn,
was there even a bump,
a rattle, a shake in the treetops?
Did tyrants tumble off
their gilded thrones? Did
evil-doers apologize
and make amends to the poor?
Did anyone intending
to decapitate anyone
think better of it
and put the sword aside?
Did missiles sputter out
and fail to drop? Did guns
forget where their bullets were?
Alas, the news
seems just as bad as ever.
Yet as I walk this morning
it seems a softer sun,
an air less dense
with the burning of forests,
birds calling one another
with shana tova greetings,
a sense from them at least
that things, if not great,
will not be as bad as they might.
At the top of the year,
something there is
that is not schmegegge.
