HoopDance

_____”Librarians much prefer reading to the ‘infantry’
rather than becoming the infantry in a cultural war.”

With the sound of one small snick it begins.
A tiny fiction struck by hand across the truth,
like red phosphorous on a matchstick it conjures

A devil’s firework of intimidation from the
once inert ground of sulfur, KClO₃, and silica.
Scratch and its head spews fear

Jagged as a swastika. Sparks explode
thermals of smoke, slice through bindings,
tear quotes from context.

Stoked by the storm of pages, quartos
crumble under the acrid stink of matches.
Edges singe. Books blacken, and sanity

Sucks like oxygen from rational discussion.
Whole futures die in the heat of censorship.
Thought itself dissolves in ashes of silence.

Safety matches are only ’safe’ because
they don’t spontaneously combust. But,
all it takes is one brazen lie to ignite a mob.

© Val Morehouse, Oct. 2008

Indignation, Philip Roth’s newest, is a small but potent box of surprises: a little J.D. Salinger, a bit of Henry James, and a dash of Alice Sebold’s voice from beyond.  Roth follows sophomore college student Marcus Messner from his Newark Jewish neighborhood to Ohio’s WASP Winesburg College. A master commentator on country and conscience, Roth’s story is set in 1951 as the draft reaps any man without a deferment for the bloody foxholes of Korea. Young Marcus, a kosher butcher’s son, is a true American innocent in spite of his intimate acquaintance with butcher shop blood and entrails.  Roth’s foreshadowing lovingly develops the boy’s meat market education in all its gory detail.

Soon enough Marcus and Roth’s readers will discover that killing can be done with more than a cleaver. (Read on …)

When a spiritual polymath with a poetic voice encounters a worthy biographer, who is himself an expert in French poetry,  thorough researcher, sensitive interpreter, and eloquent writer, the result is stunning.  Such is Spiritual Radical, volume two in Edward K. Kaplan’s study of Abraham Joshua Heschel, a foremost thinker of 20th century American Judaism. Winner of the 2007 National Jewish Book Award in the American Jewish Studies given by the Jewish Book Council, the book covers Heschel’s escape to the United States in 1940 until his death.

Walk the shelves of Temple Isaiah’s library noting author’s names, and you will touch the cast of this book. The seminal Jewish-American thinkers appear in intimate detail, revealed through their synergy and their cultural wars with Heschel. For readers it’s a verbal trip to Heschel’s study, piled with books and papers, as the man himself sits smoking a cigar, sharing notes from his latest conversation about “radical amazement.” The immediacy is heightened by numerous candid photos. (Read on …)

Popping pills? Suicide? Lethal injections? These are reasons given [CC Times, 11/6/2007, A1] for two mothers’ request for removal of Lois Lowry’s prizewinning novel The Giver from all Mount Diablo Schools reading lists and libraries. Not so fast. Before we “burn” this book, readers should take these out-of-context conclusions, and place the pieces right back in context where they belong, inside the whole story. (Read on …)

“Old woman, where is it? Give it up!”
You crouch saying nothing.
“Nothing?” One soldier ravishes
a green crust jaded with mold,
your answer, from the
small box of your body.

Like opals your eyes alarm them.
Faces consume your last moments,
but soldiers cannot devour
your miserable crust,
or your tears not different from
diamonds, or wind
that curls snail-like in each ear.

You breathe once. Still they find
nothing. Jewels in your cupboard,
gems in plain sight sparkle.
“You are wasting your time,” you say.
Armpit, breast, wrist, crotch,
eyelid, pulse, and pelvis are
pregnant with your secrets.

One brainy pearl mothered inside
your shell, wheels of blood,
the liver a garnet hub,
intestines that gust in weighty
rhythm; thus your heart keeps
time with sighs. The soldiers
at last synchronize.

One hand knots podlike lungs
with silence. Outside snow
dissolves into a white buzz only
soldiers hear now. Their hearts
counting down time yours lost, white
drifts ticking from bone of what was
once your house.

© Version 2007 Val Morehouse. All Rights Reserved.

poetry