The Fine art of Approval the Mean solar day:
Poems with a Jewish Theme

Louder: we can't hear you (yet!), The Political Poems of Marge Piercy

Winner of the 2000 Paterson Poetry Prize

Appearing in various collections and spanning two decades, Marge Piercy's liturgical poems have been recited in people's homes and places of worship; in wedding and shabbat services; in rituals of the Passover Seder, Rosh Chodesh, and the Jewish High Holy Days. Some of these poems are highly personal and bargain with the poet's family and her babyhood, while others concern themselves with midrash (contemporary interpretations of the torah) or a new take on Jewish tradition. Now, for the outset time, all these poems have been collected in one volume.

ISBN: 0-375-40477-5
Published by Alfred A. Knopf

"Accessible, transformative, thrilling. Marge Piercy teases out the spiritual lights hidden within the most ordinary events. Hither is poetry so reverent and disturbing that it borders on liturgy."
– Rabbi Lawrence Kushner

"Proceed her book near your home altar; Marge Piercy will give wings to your heart's stirrings."
– Rabbi Zalman Yard. Schachter-Shalom

"If poetry, every bit Auden said, exists to praise, so surely it exists to anoint. And Marge Piercy teaches us the art of blessing in her poems, with the firmness of her eye, the backbone of her forcefulness, the directness of her linguistic communication, every bit gritty and sweet and real as the fruits she carries with her on all her journeys through family unit retention and tradition, prayer and the holy days of sacred year, gathering her wisdom and the wisdom of her difficult Jewish tribe, and bringing that wisdom home."
– Rodger Kamenetz, writer of The Jew in the Lotus

"Whether I discover myself guffawing over 'Eat fruit' or falling shattered by "At the well' or being attuned to the Breath of Life by 'Nishmat,' it is my life–my whole life–that I am finding, renewed and enlivened past these poems. Nosotros tin can shmooze these poems, pray these poems, Torah-written report these poems. What nosotros jiff out, Piercy has breathed in; what Piercy breaths out, we tin can breath in. We and she breath each other into life."
– Rabbi Arthur Waskow

"Marge Piercy's superb spiritual powers are up to their elbows in the lived globe, bringing a liberated and grounded wisdom to everything they bear upon. Behind this book one hears the great embracing toast of Jewish tradition: '50'Chaim!' — 'to life!' In its pages the work of the heart and the work of the spirit are visibly, passionately advanced."
– Jane Hirschfield

"The Art of Blessing the Day is organized in six sections, each comprised of poems having to deal with Jewish life and ritual:

Mishpocheh (Family)
The Chuppah (Wedlock)
Tikkum Olam (Repair of the world)
Maggidim, Midrashim (Of History and Interpretation)
Tefillah (Prayer)
Ha Shana (The Year)

Many of these poems are commonly used in shabbat services, weddings, funerals, memorials, bar- and bat- mitzvah ceremonies, Passover seders and Jewish High Holiday services.

Here is a pocket-sized sampling:

The Chuppah

The chuppah stands on four poles.
The home has its four corners.
The chuppah stands on four poles.
The matrimony stands on four legs.
Iv points loose the winds
that blow on the walls of the business firm,
the south wind that brings the warm rain,
the due east current of air that brings the cold rain,
the northward wind that brings the cold sun
and the snow, the long westward air current
bringing the weather condition off the far plains.

Here we live open up to the seasons.
Here the winds caress and gage united states of america
opposite and fierce as bears.
Here the winds are caught and snarling
in the pines, a cat in a net clawing
breaking twigs to fight loose.
Here the winds brush your face
soft in the forenoon as feathers
that float downward from a dove's breast.

Here the moon sails up out of the ocean
dripping similar a just washed apple.
Here the lord's day wakes usa like a baby.
Therefore the chuppah has no sides.

It is non a box.
Information technology is non a coffin.
It is non a dead terminate.
Therefore the chuppah has no walls.
We have made a domicile together
open to the weather of our time.
We are mills that plow in the winds of struggle
converting fierce energy into breadstuff.

The awning is the cloth of our table
where we share fruit and vegetables
of our labor, where our care for the earth
comes dorsum and nosotros take its trunk in ours.
The canopy is the cover of our bed
where our bodies open their portals wide,
where we eat and drink the blood
of our love, where the skin shines red
as a swallowed sunrise and we burn
in one furnace of joy molten every bit steel
and the dream is mankind and flower.

O my beloved O my love we dance
nether the chuppah continuing over the states
similar an brute on its iv legs,
like a table on which we set our dear
as a feast, like a tent
under which we work
not safe but no longer solitary
in the searing heat of our time.

Kaddish

Look effectually united states, search above u.s., below, backside.
We stand in a great web of being joined together.
Let united states praise, let us love the life we are lent
passing through us in the body of Israel
and our own bodies, let'southward say amen.

Fourth dimension flows through us like h2o.
The by and the expressionless speak through us.
Nosotros breathe out our children'south children, approving.

Blessed is the globe from which we grow,
Blessed the life we are lent,
blessed the ones who teach us,
blest the ones we teach,
blest is the word that cannot say the celebrity
that shines through u.s.a. and remains to shine
flowing past distant suns on the way to forever.
Let's say amen.

Blessed is low-cal, blessed is darkness,
but blest above all else is peace
which bears the fruits of noesis
on strong branches, allow's say amen.

Peace that bears joy into the world,
peace that enables love, peace over Israel
everywhere, blessed and holy is peace, allow's say amen.

Apple tree sauce for Eve

Those old daddies cursed you and us in you,
damned for your curiosity: for your sin
was wanting knowledge. To try, to gustation,
to have into the body, into the brain
and plow each thing, each sign, each factoid
round and circular equally new facets glint and white
fractures into colors and the image breaks
into crystal fragments that pierce the fretfulness
while the brain casts the chips into patterns.

Each experiment sticks a finger deep in the pie,
dares beingness, blows a horn in the ear
of belief, lets the nasty and difficult brats
of existent questions into the still air
of the desiccated parlor of stasis.
What nosotros all know to be true, constant,
melts similar frost landscapes on a window
in a jet of steam. How many last words
in how many dead languages would interpret into,
Just what happens if I, and Whoops!

We run into Adam wagging his tail, adept dog, adept
canis familiaris, while you lot and the ophidian shimmy upwards the tree,
lab partners in a trip the light fantastic of will and hunger,
that thirst not of the mankind simply of the brain.
Men ever think women are wanting sex,
cock, snake, when it is the globe she's after.
Then nascence trauma for the kickoff conceived child
of the ego, I think therefore I am, I
kicking the tree, who am I, why am I,
going, going to die, die, die.

You are indeed the female parent of invention,
the first scientist. Your proper name means
life: finite, dynamic, pond against
the current of time, tasting, testing,
eating knowledge like whatsoever other nutrient.
We are all the children of your bright hunger.
We are all products of that first experiment,
for if death was the worm in that apple tree,
the seeds were liberty and the flowering of choice.

All Poems, Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, Middlemarsh, Inc.
They may not be reproduced in print or electronically without prior written permission of the publisher.

fromThe Fine art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme
Alfred A. Knopf Publisher, New York
ISBN 0-375-40477-v
Available in Paperback