TWO POEMS

Later, in America

In New Hampshire, my grandmother tried to tell a French-Canadian nurse
they’d wait until the circumcision to name him.

So when my father, Nathan, applied for his first passport, he discovered
he officially began as Later. Funny for a man always at the airport early.

His mother’s English never prospered.
Her lips would not surrender to its shapes.

She’d been born Yiddish, syllables coating her tongue like milk,
the way first language bears us—sometimes across an ocean.

Yiddish was her Old-New World, where life muttered, shouted, sang,
and begged and wailed and whispered.

When she quizzed her children about their Boston shul.
When she mourned the sounds or klangen of a shtetl street.

Her sons and daughters refused to speak
their American thoughts to her in Yiddish.

I waited too long to ask. Absence cannot answer.
But finally I have learned the words: far vos? Why?

Yiddish Cento*

It is always about bread and death.
A person can forget everything but eating.
Better an egg today than an ox tomorrow.
Better one friend with a dish of food than a hundred with a sigh.

He who has not tasted the bitter does not understand the sweet.
All is not butter that comes from a cow.
Only in dreams are carrots as big as bears.
If you can’t endure the bad, you will not live to witness the good.

A man should stay alive if only out of curiosity.
He should laugh with the lizards.
Laughter is heard farther than weeping.
If you’re fated to drown, you will drown in a spoonful of water.

Man begins in dust and ends in dust—
meanwhile, it’s good to drink some vodka.
Enjoy life—you can always commit suicide later.
If you’re going to eat pork, get it all over your beard.

*all the lines in this poem are Yiddish sayings

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Susan Cohen‘s poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review 25th Anniversary Anthology, the Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, the Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. Her second full-length collection, A Different Wakeful Animal, won the David Martinson-Meadowhawk Prize from Red Dragonfly Press and was a finalist for the Philip Levine Prize. She lives in Berkeley, where she is finally learning Yiddish.