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Say This To Joe C---, For Me, After Forty Years
The thoughts we shared during our adolescence
expanded with their cruelty's tumescence,
until some incident could shriek, "No more,"
and free me from antisemitic lore.
This poem, to you, is settling of the score.
Your big mouth, Joe, set off the verbal trigger,
providing opportunity (and bigger
than conscience could, in all good faith, ignore):
you called my high school sweetheart a "sand ------."
At that moment, all that we had held hallow
revealed itself as crude, uncouth, and shallow.
To hold against a whole people this grudge;
and those we knew, held in contempt; to judge
one person that way insults Abraham
(and God will bless who blesses him, and damn
who hates---slurs---persecutes---or curses him;
this is a promise, sworn, and not a whim).
Yes, giggle, Joe, and roll your rheumy eyes;
but I shall stand with them whom you despise;
I spit upon your propogandic trash.
No more could I deny the holocaust;
nor fail to mourn all those six million lost---
raped----tortured---starved---enslaved---gassed, shot, or burned:
no, Joe, these are the facts. I have not spurned
nor question them. Thank God for Israel:
I pray she will be kept safe, whole, and well.
Their lives are our responsibility
because, with them, we share humanity.
We are the same species, and the same kind;
and for compassion we have been designed.
This is the right way---courteous, refined.
To do less---to give in to wrath or wrash
hatred in word or deed (or in thought, crammed)
is to identify with human trash;
let prejudice, at God's Judgement, be damned.
Starward
[jlc]
