VIDDUI by Lisa Badner

VIDDUI

I never heard my father utter “god”
except in rote Hebrew prayers.

Yeshiva of Flatbush bred – he insisted on two sets of dishes
two cutleries, kosher meat.

My mother – a German Jew, obliged.
Sneaking me out for crispy bacon on Saturdays

while dad went to shul. But at home
we went through the motions.

For a while, I even recited the shema before going to sleep,
kneeling at the bed, like the Christian kids on TV –

I said the words –
Eventually, being in the kosher baking business, my father

fed up by the scamming koshering rabbis –
stopped caring about kosher meat (so expensive!);

The cutlery and dishes in their house got mixed up
and dad only went to Shul on the high holidays.

When he was dying, I arranged for a Rabbi
to visit him – laminated viddui prayer in hand –

hoping to bring some kind of comfort, to him
or maybe to me. To be enveloped

in that end-of-life blanket that only belief can bring.
Come on dad, I implored,

but he waved them away.
And I sat alone with him at the end

watching his body actively dying,
with nowhere to go.

*

Lisa Badner’s debut poetry collection, FRUIT CAKE, was published in 2022 by Unsolicited Press. Lisa’s writing has appeared in Rattle, the New Ohio Review, The Satirist, PANK, Fourteen Hills, Unbroken, The Fruit Slice, the Mid-Atlantic Review, among others, and forthcoming in Pine Hills Review. Lisa has been nominated for a Pushcart and made once it to “special mention.” Lisa lives in Brooklyn. See https://lisabadner.com/ for more.