Upper West Side Bris
When my nephew was born that fall,
his bris fell on a holy day, Shmini Atzeret.
The mohel, an Orthodox rabbi,
weighing his religious obligations,
consented to perform the service,
but he had to walk forty blocks,
climb eleven stories up the highrise stairwell,
to avoid “working,” a legalistic term
having little to do with effort.
My wife and I had driven up from Baltimore,
a four-hour trip that made me feel
like a martyr, an epic effort out of The Odyssey,
the tolls, the traffic, the impossible parking.
When Finklestein’s faint tap came
at my brother-in-law’s door,
an eloquent Morse Code signal of fatigue,
the bearded man mopping his face,
my embarrassment cut my sense of sacrifice
like a sort of moral circumcision itself.
Bomb Scare
Oh Lord God.
The Subject line in the e-mail
was a garble of characters,
and I didn’t recognize the sender’s name.
But the word “Bomb” exploded
from the alphabet soup of type
crawling like bugs across my computer screen.
“Didi!” I yelped, rocketing
out of my chair as if I’d been shot,
hurrying down to my co-worker’s cube.
Didi works with the emergency response staff,
so I thought of him first.
“Come here to my desk, please.”
I tried to sound calm but I could tell
he knew I was freaked by something.
Ever since 9/11 I take all this seriously,
especially working in a government agency.
“Send that to the security desk, Sandra,”
Didi told me, cool as an after-work drink.
He even looked like he was smiling,
as if he found it funny.
I know I shouldn’t be so scared,
but when you lose somebody you know
like I did at the Pentagon that day,
you don’t get over it so easy.
© Eliezer Berrios: IMG_20200222_114320189[3]