TO BE LIKE YOU
In memory of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
I want to be like you, RBG.
I want to ride an elephant in India
with my polar opposite.
I want to dine with this friend,
go to operas with him, pinch myself
to keep from laughing when his humor splits me
in a place as sober as the Supreme Court.
I want my family to gather with his
on holidays and birthdays,
putting politics aside for friendship.
I want to banish beliefs to another room,
muted for a while, so they won’t interfere
when a man whose opinions and conclusions
I fiercely oppose
sends me two dozen roses on my birthday.
I want to smile as gratefully as you did.
When I think of you, RBG, I see my mother,
the light in her eyes when she tells me the story—
how she and you were best friends in grade school
in Brooklyn, the two best students in the class.
How your parents took her to the opera with you.
How decades later, from her home in Israel,
she sent a letter to you at the Supreme Court.
I want to be like you, RBG: the kind of woman
who, no matter how busy, finds a moment
to read a letter from her childhood friend.
A woman who writes back.
*
Lori Levy’s poems have appeared in Rattle, Poet Lore, Paterson Literary Review, Mom Egg Review, ONE ART, and numerous other online and print literary journals and anthologies in the U.S., the U.K., and Israel. Two of her chapbooks were published in 2023: “What Do You Mean When You Say Green? and Other Poems of Color” (Kelsay Books) and “Feet in L.A., But My Womb Lives in Jerusalem, My Breath in Vermont” (Ben Yehuda Press). Levy lives with her husband in Los Angeles, but “home,” for her, has also been Vermont and Israel.
Great poem