What a new day!

for Dr. Natalie Polzer

Amar Shah · What a new day!

Hello! Good wishes. Did you pass a happy
Pesach, God delivers us each day
from evils new and old and every year,
invites us back into the kingdom.
I wonder if,
remembering me, it comes to mind the Seder
where you hosted me among your family,
and the music of your daughter’s voice.
She read us Apple Blossom, a poem by
a Northern Irishman. Just a couple
short years later I postgraduate,
squeaky squire quartered to the Queen’s,
riding glens of Antrim’s orange green,
setting sight on Ulster’s Scottish sister,
lowlands ‘cross the sea...
Apple Blossom,
years ago I figured if I died
in traffic accident or executed
by police, they, planting on me grams,
would find a couple dozen feet of meter,
rhythmic as, more meaningful than
quartal cadence of the credit card.
So since a young adult (oh really?), since
a boy on littered streets of fatherhood,
I bring with me a folded print of Apple
Blossom, a youth whom whiskey’d led astray,
the ugly morning after, my first day.

Apple Blossom, the moments in your class
I learned from first to write and speak, I loved
your love for scribbled, backwards text, hand-scripted
anagram and glyph where letters, numbers
be and mystic math, and roots expanding,
shaping into structures of the timeless
realm of Melekh ha-Olam. How could
a Hebrew speaker not be true believer?
How could a reader not be red about
the face from all the grandeur? What philistine
could listen, not allow their breath, ruach,
escape to join with spirit, one who breathed
a man from dust, adam from adamah,
chaya, chava, wherever shemesh, there
is tzael.
I loved your love of language such,
so much that when you left the lectern’s touch—
okay, a grade below your pay—but when
you left I couldn’t bear to stay, I couldn’t
place the master with a faker, who couldn’t
trace by heart the vocals underneath
the tzadi, pe? After all, those aren’t
practical, not printed new in journal.

I quit and anyway, considered lucky,
the player joyless, voices on the news
were worthy such to her, she’d pick a quarrel
at the school of anthropology,
they dared to string a line with flags
of Israel and Palestine.
And at our Classic seminar,
you, me and Leah at the well,
the Zohar entered early to my brain,
and many urgent months required. And during
brutal treatment and recovery,
how I mourned—how I haven’t fully
yet to mourn—no chance to study, us,
we three, Torah, the law, the careful mean
of all the small, not news, but worthy squiggles.

Apple Blossom in my pocket, flaming
swords, the trash and litter, ocean after
ocean, whiskeyed nights and bitter gates
and orchards clinging, too. I have the poem
memorized but not by any order,
the images, they shape and form, materialize
around my solid god, around the Mother.
And every morning when escape the warm
embrace of bed, go out and look into
the sky that G-d has made and say, What a

new day! What a, what a new day! What a
new day, new day, new day! What a new day!