[Draft of Song Lyric]

My father’s three sisters have gone to their rest

Not one of them getting an easy way out

And led there by loving and hard living men

Returning at last to my grandmother’s breast

My father’s three brothers all did their best

Trying to do well for better or worse

Survivors destroyed by salvation in wars

Returning at last to my grandmother’s breast

The father I knew has been long in the dust

And the snow that I knew that he never would leave

And my brother and I will follow in dreams

Returning at last to my grandmother’s breast

My children can’t live as we did in the West

My children won’t have any right of return

I ran from the love of the land and the blood,

Returning no more to my grandmother’s breast.

I want them to know that we did what we must,

Going back to the red clay and moss of the South

Reducing the wind and the sand to these words

Returning at last to my grandmother's breast

The numbing down of our everyday lives proceeds like a painless dentist.

Weird, when you have to retrieve your 15 year old boy who has without announcement skipped his sister's birthday dinner to have Shabbat dinner at the rabbi chaplain's table. You don't know the address, although you've been provided with a general description of the house. After dark, You can't count on finding a porch light on, so you have to squint for clues like a mezuzzah. You can't call him after dark, and the family doesn't know who you are or why you are there. A minute after starting to pound on the door, you're being shown into a brightly lit dining room and introduced to most of the dozen people at the table -- the rabbi's wife, three daughters, and son; a couple of chaplaincy students from the Army post. Three or four others are better known to you, schoolmates of your son's, and the son himself, in a Yemini-style kippah. You're supposed to extract him from a vegetarian Shabbos dinner in favor of Outback Steakhouse, but as he says, "This is the best challah I've ever tasted." I don't know how much of a diplomat my wife thinks I am, but if ever I needed to be, that was when.

DRAFT

I want to write a song of ourself, ourselves,

in which we see ourselves as mere spectators

of a game between this and that -- not them and us

and, God forbid, not good and evil,

and according to our disposition

betting or not betting on the outcome,

watching the clock or the inning expire,

agitated by the gross or subtle expression of the strong or the cagy

according to our disposition,

and participating just as much as the players do

that is, as most of us do, from a distance usually safe

from the fights and foul balls.

Finally, I pray, we will find the point

not to be strength or caginess, not to be deception or execution, but

endurance and energy over the passing of time.

We will see the actual drizzle and not the telephoto sheet of rain,

something that passes, as we do, ephemeral

as a desert creek at times yielding the delicate trout,

as we see and for a moment may be privileged to hear

the people on the lawn, the clay, the humble mat,

or if we insist the raked track or the blond hardwood floor,

released by what is not their work but their daily play

to say what makes them like ourselves,

as this song itself admits that itself is a version of something

well recalled from our grandfather's generation, and has a point.

I want to say our anxiety will burn off then and we will stand for the stretch

as a candlestick stands reflective (yes, and empty)

on the table of an everyday afternoon,

understanding and taking part in the clarity of light and air

where the terms of the contest are clear. That is enough.