Here’s our next offering from Varda Branfman. Let’s hear you react!

Desire

Comes in the form of
Sunflower cookies
On a cold, life-seeking night
In October
Portland, Maine

The thought of them
Propels me down streets
To the other side
Of a town that would laugh if it knew—
A six pack, or maybe a gallon
Of chocolate chip ice cream—
But some cookie
a health food nut
Thought up
Don’t lose sleep over it

I pass the Street of the Jews
Which only old timers remember why
It’s called that
On the edge where Portland Harbor
Dips into land
Three houses like shipwrecks
made of massive stone
with no neighbors
As if they had
Something catching

There are ghettos in old black
And white photos
But the only ghetto I saw
And touched
Were those cold stones
In Portland

They’re apartments now
For singles with dogs
Or couples with one child
And those odd black stones
Look medieval on this New England bay

I stand there thinking
Of redeeming those Jews’ houses
By putting back
Mezuzos
And candlelight in the windows
At sunset

Back then when I hardly knew
What a Jew was
I stood long enough by those stones
To let it sink in
Whatever it was that spoke to me
Out of their strangeness

And then I kept walking
Wanting those cookies even more
Desire so huge
It filled my universe
And easily
A rather small-sized city
Like Portland
Big enough to have a ghetto

As if having those cookies
Would quench all hunger and thirst
Or maybe the sunflowers have some
Vitamin or mineral
My body craved to make
It whole