Sarah Mathes and Erika Meitner are award-winning American poets who notably explore Jewish themes in their work. The poems presented below are thoughtful jumping-off points to discuss the Passover holiday, the Exodus from Egypt and anything else that comes up at the seder table.
Mathes and Meitner will be reading together at Porter Square Books in Cambridge on Tuesday, April 12, at 7 p.m.
“The Burning Bush is a Blackberry Bush”
By Sarah Mathes
I wrote the poem. And then I rewrote it, and made it worse.
I thought time would heal it. Time passed. I did research: Exodus,
midrash, my mother. I rewrote the poem. I ate fistfuls of soft berries. Navy
lips. Purple lips. Juice bursting out of black balloons. I made it worse.
The poem knocked around my mind like unlabeled preserves darkening in the fridge.
Outside the page: tableaus of simple beauty.
Three different trees in one line of sight—plum, pear, palm.
Inside: A hand runs under a faucet, the soap stinging invisible cuts to life.
Have you seen a blackberry bush at the exact moment of its blushing,
when its tight little spheres bleed the green seeds bloody—
have you walked by shoeless on the way to the lake,
the sun lifting the hairs on your cheek,
no matter where you turn, something you love coming after you,
the bush burning in the stripped light,
unripe, alive, surviving—
Used with permission of the author and reprinted from “Town Crier: Poems” by Sarah Mathes, winner of the 2020 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize.
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