Poem for Yom Kippur

The Good Son
By Jason Shinder

If God had come to me and said,
if you are willing to forget your self

you will find the cure for heart attacks and compose
the greatest symphonies,

I wouldn't have been sure of my answer.
Because there wouldn't have been enough

attention to my suffering. And that's unforgivable.
But I keep on forgiving myself

with God's love. And it's strange I should say this
because my mother died of a heart attack

after months in a hospital room full of a silence
that lodged itself like a stone in her throat.

And she thought I was wonderful
and would do anything for her.

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I went looking for another Shinder poem after Edward Hirsch wrote about him in this week's Poet's Choice and came upon this really stunning poem for the Day of Atonement.

We woke Sunday morning to ongoing drizzle after the long, hard rain of the day before, and decided reluctantly that it was probably crazy to drive the 2+ hours to the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire when there was more rain forecast for Lancaster for the afternoon and the joust was apparently postponed on Saturday because the ground was already so muddy. Instead Dementordelta and I went to check out the Halloween collections at Target and Pier One -- lots of bats and owls, from classy glass to glittery-sparkly glitter -- then went out to lunch at Uncle Julio's.

In the afternoon we came home and watched Proof -- the wonderful 1991 movie with Hugo Weaving and Russell Crowe, not the 2005 movie with Gwyneth Paltrow -- one of my favorite films, which Dementordelta had not seen so I thought that needed to be remedied immediately. Then we watched the pilot of Eastwick because of Paul Gross. (He made us. He's the devil, so it's not like this is our fault.) Then, sadly, she had to go home, so I had dinner with my kids and made them clean their bathroom before Kol Nidre, because even though we did not go to services, I wasn't going to make them do chores after sundown. The Redskins justified my decision not to call myself a fan of theirs -- the name must go -- by losing to "the losingest team in football," as only Brent Musburger could declare, while the Ravens won well over the Browns, yay!

I have no appropriate Wheel of the Year photos, so even though it's technically edible, I'll post a photo from Rosh Hashanah for the season: