[New-Poetry] Poems for Chanukah

[jforjames at aol.com]

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5864

Poems for Chanukah???
?
?Meaning "dedication" in Hebrew, Chanukah celebrates the ancient victory of a band of Jewish rebels against the occupying forces who had outlawed Judaism and profaned the Temple in Jerusalem with Greek idols. The earliest version of the story was written in verse, in the biblical poetry of the Books of Maccabees. 

Modern translations of the story can be found in David Rosenberg's A Poet's Bible, which restores a powerful immediacy to the laments of Mattathias and Judah. In a psalm by Mattathias, the Jewish priest offers a heartbreaking account of the devastation of his homeland: 


Did I have to be born 
raised to be a witness
to Jerusalem taken like a whore


my people massacred in spirit
sitting propped up like dead men
watching their city fall as if at play

--
?
"Between the eve of the holiday and the final day" by Yehuda Amichai
"How beautiful are thy tents, Jacob" by Yehuda Amichai
"Near, in the Aorta's Arch" by Paul Celan
"Tabernacle Window" by Paul Celan
"Psalm III" by Allen Ginsberg
"An Old Cracked Tune" by Stanley Kunitz
"A Feast of Lights" by Emma Lazarus
"Nishmat" by Marge Piercy
"V'ahavata" by Marge Piercy
"Meditations on the Fall and Winter Holidays" by Charles Reznikoff
"Notes on the Spring Holidays" by Charles Reznikoff 
"Maccabees" by David Rosenberg
"Letter to the Front" by Muriel Rukeyser
"Blessed is the Match" by Hannah Senesh
"A Christmas Story" by Alan Shapiro
"The 151st Psalm" by Karl Shapiro
"The Coming of Light" by Mark Strand
"Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines" by Dylan Thomas


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