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Didi Goldenhar

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Rake

How do you make a moral life? Sophie
writes, and later I head to the garden
with ball of string to save my infant pea
shoots, tying them on rusty wrought iron.
Thank blooming green tulips, thank cilantro
and geraniums in cedar boxes.
I’m stumped. Humility? Among my hunches—
woman kneeling in dirt, anonymous.
But a garden’s also good for killing.
These days I prune broken wisteria,
pound snails with a red mallet, rake yellow
thatch off the lawn, almost delirious
because tools cut and shred—my shovel flies.
Soil sweetened with manure, and what dies.

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Love Trouble

I’m with your husband the widower.
But you and I, skeined to one other,
don’t speak any language.
I become one of your eulogists.
I wear the letter S.

You’re the car I almost hit.
Geese honk across the field—You?
As for size, you grow and grow.

But in this home, we must govern.
Who shall be yolk and who the white?

Fugitive wife: You won’t fold
into a box. Can I fly you, like a kite?

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Didi Goldenhar is a poet and essayist, widely published. She’s at work on a book based on her late mother’s wartime experience in France and Belgium and linked to today’s experience of refugees worldwide. For a taste, see her 2018 op-ed:
http://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2018/06/22/hidden-children-holocaust-edith-goldenhar.

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