A Literary Magazine in Support of the Jewish Community
Golden Shovel as Disclaimer (Song of Songs 1:2)
When I began this poem, I meant to let
the words seize me, my fingers like mystics, as if God Him-
self might take a moment from His busy week to kiss
the lines onto my throat or my hands or whichever part of me
becomes the oil-soaked wick that flares and burns with
what I tell my students never to call inspiration—the
dirtiest word in poetry: the secret mouth that kisses
your neck and leaves a private imprint of
longing, invisible but thudding with His
leftover notions, as if even the mouth
of the river of God’s wisdom is unfit for
your beginner’s boots, your burlap sack, your
rusted shovel. We all try to scoop up proof of God’s love
like the citizens of a hurricane town gathering sand under siege. Is
admitting we should have been more prepared better
than lying to ourselves? Anything written in our own code is better than
digging transcriptions out of the riverbank, water slipping past like wine.
Golden Shovel as Craft Talk (Song of Songs 1:3)
When you wrestle with a sacred book, words like thine
and thee appear everywhere, as if asking to be anointed with oils,
hoping to carry the perfume of blessing to those who have
offered up their hearts (or whatever body part a
sinner believes will do the most good),
all wrongs canceled by the fragrance
of sacrifice. I trouble daily every thy,
every thou, fretting over the name
of God. Every superstition, though forbidden, is
alive in my hands and on my tongue, as
though the lessons of childhood were holy oil
I cannot wash away or absorb, poured
into whatever part of me struggles to keep out
disbelief or doubt. All translation treads on the sacred and
thus all translators pretend to remove their shoes so
they can do their work. How do I mention the
most embarrassing word I’ve found and replaced with young
women? It’s virgins, of course—another instance of women
measured for their worth. How our forebears love
to exalt virgins, telling lies right to God’s face: Lord, I made these for You.
Golden Shovel as a Brief History of Our Exile (Song of Songs 1:5)
Show me where all this anger should go. I
tried to show You the way I am
still spinning the world bright from inside black
depths that surround and
suspend our almost-lovely
planet, orbit-bright inventor of the seasons. O
God, I am just another of Your daughters
struggling inside the downspout of
time’s weather, which flees sky and soil as we fled Jerusalem
when the temple fell. I am as lost as
all that water, as lost as the banished souls inventing the
diaspora in their wake, huddled in the tents
they came to call home: walls woven of
loss and camel hair and carried through Kedar
as they learned to swallow their enemies, as
they began to call themselves Solomon’s
children, as we became a people behind those curtains.
Becka Mara McKay
Becka Mara McKay is a poet and a translator of Hebrew literature. She directs the Creative Writing MFA at Florida Atlantic University, where she is faculty advisor to Swamp Ape Review. Her newest book of poetry is The Little Book of No Consolation (Barrow Street Press, 2021).
