This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
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Welcome to Poetry Moment.
According to Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld, Passover ends with the “colorful” song Chad Gadya—"an Only Kid”. The lyrics begin with a baby goat and include a funny/not funny narrative that just keeps unraveling. However, explains the rabbi, “The repetition in each stanza [also] underscores the ebb and flow of Jewish history.” In today’s poem, “Family Passover,” poet Leonard Kress adds his own layer of meaning.
Leonard Kress has published work in Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Collections include The Orpheus Complex, Walk Like Bo Diddley. Living in the Candy Store, and Craniotomy Sestinas, as well as a verse translation of the Polish Romantic epic, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz. He has grants in Poetry and Playwriting from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Kress currently teaches at Temple University.
In “Family Passover,” Leonard Kress uses puns, misunderstandings, religious ritual, and Had Gadya’s repetitive slaughter to expose what’s missing in a family. The father, with no faith in religion and little familial conviction, is “complicit” in the song’s long list of violence. “The absence of The Holy One from the ending of that seder speaks as loudly as his mother's lack of singing her children to sleep and his father's lack of faith but (apparently unwarranted) belief in the pleasantness of his own voice.” Will the Angel of Death pass over this household? The last verse of the song assures us that even the Angel of Death must answer to the Holy One. Even if there is not protection for every "kid" (animal or human,) at least the world bends towards justice, and the Holy One is present to keep it that way. By the end of the poem, however, the son remains unsure.
Here’s “Family Passover” by Leonard Kress
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the terrible Had Gadya machine
Yehuda Amichai
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I never heard my mother sing—not even her kids
to sleep, except at the end of our Passover meal.
One kid, she sang, one kid (with me thinking she meant me)
my father bought for two zuzin, devoured—God knows why—
at the song’s house-that-Jack-built, conveyor-belt ending.
Angel of death who slaughters the butcher who butchers
the ox who drinks the water that put out the fire that
burned the stick that beat the dog that bit the cat that ate
the kid. My atheist-scientist father along
full-throated with her, who fancied himself a crooner,
complicit, no assurance the kid was a baby
goat, for who in the suburbs ever saw goats except
to nuzzle and then feed, fenced-in at the petting zoo.
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Appears in Walk Like Bo Diddley (Leonard Kress, Black Swamp Poetry Press, 2016)
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That was “Family Passover” by Leonard Kress. Thanks for listening.
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Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
