A Literary Magazine in Support of the Jewish Community
God's Speech
My parents were most in love
when they spoke the little Yiddish
they remembered, sounding like
exotic birds or a soundtrack
to a film they starred in, more romantic
without the subtitles,
which would have revealed
their workaday conversation:
vi iz geven gesheft
an ander drek tog—
but it was the other world,
it was G-d’s speech, what
they didn’t want to pass on,
that language that killed
their cousins, that language
their parents suffered
not to speak. But
they sometimes fargesn
and slipped into the oy gevalts
and the sheyn punims
of their childhoods, which,
against their best intentions,
no matter how hard they tried not to,
they left a bisl
to us, their liebchens.
Philip Terman
Philip Terman’s most recent books are This Crazy Devotion (Breadstone Books, 2020), Our Portion: New and Selected Poems (Autumn House Press, 2015) and, as co-translator with the Syrian writer and translator Saleh Razzouk, Tango Beneath a Narrow Ceiling: The Selected Poems of Riad Saleh Hussein (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2021). Poems and essays appear in many journals and anthologies, including Poetry Magazine, The Kenyon Review, The Sun, and Poetry International. He directs The Bridge Literary Arts Center in Franklin, PA and co-directs the Jewish Poets Reading Series, sponsored by the Jewish Community Center of Buffalo. On occasion, he performs his poetry with the jazz band Catro. For more information, visit www.philipterman.com.
