A Post-Yom Kippur Poem

“Who is like you, God amongst the gods?”

When at the heights of ecstatic glory,
And connected to a still small Nothing,
I did enter through the gates of being
Into Life, seeing the emptiness of truth,
Feeling the fullness of the Almighty,
And burying my head e’er so humbly
In a shroud of omnipresent rocking,
When, in short, I looked upon the visage,
That intimate blackness beloved by death—
Instead of vanishing I rescinded
Into the sweat beneath my testicles,
And worse, since more distracting from the Source,
To unwelcome yet no less present thought,
Thought not of the nullity but of me—
How holy I had been to feel humble,
To sway possessed of a divinity,
To mutter words that seemed to move the stars.
Ah, dreadful thoughts reminding me I am,
Would you not disperse and leave me alone?
Body guards of the king, did you trust me?
Why, when rising from the ground did you ask,
“What will others, less seized by muses think?”
Why, after my head had bowed to YHWH,
Did you petition me to look around
To see who else had bowed and for how long?
Why, when wailing words by heart, did I turn
My gaze to my book’s ensnaring bosom,
My now opened eyes weighed down with writing?

Why, Great Presider of this world and next,
Did I return from You unto myself
If not by your divine decree, now sealed?
Why, being imperfect, am I not to sing,
Exalting not in sin but that I sin,
And yet am still forgiven being dust?
Indeed, I know, thank God for that I know,
I am but a figment of creation,
And as a piece of work, a masterpiece,
A piece of your hands, a work in progress.
And thus I end, though it is up to you
When I’ll expire and become a ruins.
For now, thank you for crafting me a self
And yet giving me a preview of why,
In the midst of becoming I can see
My limbs as coextensive with the moon’s,
My heart a life-source of our universe.