Tag: Hannukah

My wet eyes stared into their lights by Roseanne Freed

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My wet eyes stared into their lights

During our family FaceTime call
at Chanukah last year,
we lit the fifth day candles
on the menorah,
and my seven-year-old granddaughter,
the image of her late mother,
asked us,

            Who misses Mama the most?

I’ve spent the whole year wondering
how to answer.

At a Shabbat dinner on Friday night
when the woman opposite me said,
Where are your children?
I could tell her my son lives in Canada.
But I don’t know where my daughter
is — she didn’t leave a forwarding address
when she left.

*

Roseanne Freed grew up in apartheid South Africa and now lives in Los Angeles, where she takes inner-city school children hiking in the Santa Monica mountains. A Best of the Net and a Pushcart nominee, her poems have appeared in ONE ART, MacQueens Quinterly, Naugatuck River Review, and Blue Heron Review among others.

Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel by Howie Good

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Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel

After 30 minutes of Christmas music, the high school choir broke into the Hanukkah song “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel” at the holiday concert. The person seated beside me began to complain under her breath. Jesus Fucking Christ! I thought. I examined her out of the corner of my eye. She wasn’t an obvious Nazi. Somewhere in her fifties, she was trying hard to look younger, a frosted blonde with the sharp features of the obsessive dieter. I didn’t say anything, though I might have let out a sigh. The song changed to something Christmassy. I focused on my daughter up on stage. She was heedlessly singing, her face all alight.

*

Howie Good’s latest poetry books are The Horse Were Beautiful, available from Grey Book Press, and Swimming in Oblivion: New and Selected Poems from Redhawk Publications.

To Light the Whole of the World by Dick Westheimer

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To Light the Whole of the World

Tonight we set
the menorah
in the window
facing the world.

I light the first candle
which flickers feebly
against the whole of darkness.
I look from the flame

and see reflected
in the glass
my hand holding
the glowing shamash,

the helper that will light
two candles tomorrow.

*

Dick Westheimer has—with his wife and writing companion Debbie—lived on their plot of land in rural southwest Ohio for over 40 years. His most recent poems have appeared or are upcoming in Rattle, Paterson Review, Whale Road Review, Minyan, Gyroscope Review, and Cutthroat. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, poems prompted by Russia’s War on Ukraine, is forthcoming from Sheila Na Gig Books.
Website: dickwestheimer.com