holidays - Elana Klugman

A Prayer For Awakening

Please well of grace, keeper of
thresholds, root and
belly of all endings, all beginnings,
lead me into exile

I walk
through rubble
turning towards
the burning earth

Where, how
do the ancestors
live in me –

I write myself
once again
into the book of life
sky a page
river a page
muddied earth
and body a page.

Beauty returns, asks

The morning after
I wonder
was I fully present
did I receive as the earth does,
in gullies and fields filling
my empty thirsty places.

I am still the skin and bones
of old constricting stories
living in the wilderness.

Before the gates opened,

the seas parted, we brought home

a crib, first cloths, blankets soft

as a mothers face,

Miriam, my daughter
who first opened my womb
turning me into a mother,
I named you for the sea
I’d never seen,

Bo come into the captive
mind of Pharaoh, hardened,
stiffened. made resistent:
va’yichazak, va yi’cabad, va yi’kashe