Three Poems from “A Prayer of Six Wings”

Owen Lewis

A Lesson on the Jubilee Year
“Not the usual shofar trumpeting,
the yovel, also a ram’s horn,
on this sabbath of Sabbaths,

seven cycles of seven years,
when the land itself gets a rest
from feeding a nation, indulges

in random weeds, wanton vines.
Since no one knows when again
to begin the counting, debts

accumulate, interest compounds,
servitude continues. This respite
always lives in the future, an idea.”

“Why not now?” a student asks.
The old sage clears his throat,
“All twelve tribes must reside

in the land.” He’s content
with his Talmud. “But where
are they then?” the child persists,

“Can’t we make some new tribes?”
“New tribes?” the sage alarms, “No!
Who do you imagine they’d be?”

“Everyone who is already there!”
The sage seems to choke, words
fish-boned in his phlegmy throat.

“In the Gemara there’s a lost story
of the ancient rams of Mt. Moriah.
They now live on Mt. Hermon.

No one speaks their dialect.
They plead in gutturals, Take my horn
before I die, before I die, before I die.”

If the Holy Land
were itself a vessel among the first
that held the world holding itself
before creation, in which was it found?

Sages conferred: Harmony, the largest, held
contraries. But Wisdom! But Knowledge!
Younger sages argued for Kindness,
while those with tenure insisted: Kingship,
Majesty, or hallelujah’s Crown—the Keter.

A peddler picking through the papers
of the proceedings came upon Endurance,
stepchild vessel, overlooked but brimming,
overflowing: Passover’s phrase “Next year in,”
prophetic visions, scrapped texts of Sephirot,
parchment, paper, papyrus, scrolls, pens, quills,
a surveyor’s chain, zenith telescopes, map-

pieces like jigsaw puzzles, shards of the first
Endurance. Among the repaired fragments,
the duntings and crazing of many dominions
and years: here Judea and Israel, there
the walls of Rome, the floors of Istanbul,
the towers of the Crusades, the Mandate’s
borders changed with wars, truces, pieces
patched, hacked, held, beheld, more lines
of repair than pieces of clay, of earth, groves,
vineyards, farms—aeons ago the sands swept
like washing waves, melding parts whole;

and so the peddler of pieces prayed: Endurance.

Of Six Wings
We stand on our toes three times
saying kadosh, kadosh, kadosh, holy,
holy, holy, and stretch a few inches
toward heaven. It’s only a slight lift
to give a nudge to our heavy spirits.
Using inches of earthly measurement,
our imaginations must work out

the dimensions of heaven, in cubits
or yokes, can we know the Ruler? Isaiah
says it’s very complicated. Two seraphim
in unison repeat the kadosh, talking to
each another, zeh el zeh, like two old men
muttering formulas of reassurance
again and again, from generation                                                        

to generation. Isaiah explains: seraphim
each have six wings, one pair to fly with
and one pair to cover their faces,
to not look upon the Holy of Holies.
And the third? A guess? To cover their
feet! Are we supposed to be embarrassed
and hide the height of our toe-rise?

Perhaps they’re telling us: cover both eyes,
both feet in prayer. Don’t count the short
inches above the congregation’s floor.
Just don’t look. It’s about wings—the stretch
of fingered feathers—the lift-off toward
the clouds, beyond conceivable expanse, the why.
Six wings to stir the heavenly sky,

and if not us, let our prayers on six wings fly!