Horror, Too, Has a Heartbeat — Kendell Pinkney
I’ll be honest with you all, I have really struggled to find what to say with this week’s parasha, va’era. To be sure, there is much to say. After all, we finally see Moses speak to Pharaoh via his brother Aaron, followed soon after by the first seven plagues. There are so many interpretations, rabbinic, non-rabbinic, post-rabbinic, that seek to draw out the wisdom of the text and succeed in doing so. However, it is hard to do Torah and be satisfied with allegories and ill-fitting analogies when so much in the world seems damaged and broken. I need not enumerate what we have all experienced in the last week+, to say nothing of the years leading up to it. In such moments, I often need to turn to poetry to find my way back into the “skin” of this human experience.
Recently, a colleague directed me to the work of acclaimed Trinidadian poet, and Associate Professor of English at James Madison University, Lauren K. Alleyne. Simply put, her work is shimmering, complex, brilliant, and often painful to read, especially when it touches on the open wounds of what it means to live in America. Much like the Exodus stories of our ancient Israelite forebears, to live in America can at times feel as if we are living under burdens and ongoing plagues that we hope will end soon and that we hope will end well, but we simply cannot know. A select set of Alleyne’s poems do the crucial work of witnessing experiences of living and dying in America, while also attending to the beauty of form, language, and the nuance of the human experience. I encourage you all to pick up any of her works from your local independent bookseller, or library. In the meantime, I wish you all a restful shabbat, and leave you with one of her poems that I have been pondering frequently over the past week and a half.
Horror, Too, Has a Heartbeat (from Honeyfish) by Lauren K. Alleyne
They are students and pastors, doctors and teachers. They walk their dogs in parks, and plant perennials under backyard trees. They are runners, readers, car-lovers, coffee-drinkers; they know how to pick a bottle of wine and the best cuts of meat. They say good morning, ask about our days, talk about the weather. They slink past us, invisible and unnamed. They hold the doors for us, give directions to strangers passing through town. With their broad or slender hands they touch us.
They call home the same cosmic nation of which we are all citizens; they, too, are émigrés to the countries of flesh. They are our neighbors. They are our kin. At night, they close their eyes and descend into the old country, confuse it’s formlessness for shadows. Sometimes, they turn their backs and walk so deep into the mist all the pathways disappear; when they open their eyes they are no place they recognize. They wander the landscapes of mismatched realities, carrying their given or earned burdens. Sometimes the carrying kills them. Sometimes it kills us.
Love is like a language their tongues have forgotten how to move in. It lies in them, a trapped and withering worm. Sometimes they pluck it out, crush its squirming under their boots. Sometimes it’s rising drives them closer to some unspeakable edge as they watch us live inside our ordinariness, wear it like skin. They press against the borders of us, ticking with despair or bitterness or hate. They want in. They want us to come out. With desperate and hungry hands, they reach for us.
Kendell Pinkney is the Rabbinic Fellow at Ammud: The Jews of Color Torah Academy
