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.
Welcome to Poetry Moment. I’m Marjorie Maddox
Today we remember the tragic events of October 27th, 2018. On that date, a gunman entered the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and murdered eleven members of the congregation, wounding six more. In Judith Sanders’ poem, “A Mourner’s Kaddish,” she grieves for the dead and struggles to pray.
Judith Sanders’ poetry collection In Deep was published by Kelsay Books; another, The Universe with Borscht, is coming in Fall 2025. Her work appears in such publications as Pleiades [Ply-a-dees], Calyx, Modern Language Studies, Vox Populi, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, with individual poems winning the Hart Crane and Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry prizes. Her prose has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and selected as a Longreads “Top 5.” She lives in Pittsburgh.
According to Jewish tradition, mourners are never alone in their grief. They recite the Kaddish, a prayer honoring the dead and affirming Jewish faith, within a quorum of 10—called a minyan. The mourners commemorate daily for 11 months after a parent’s passing and on the anniversary of a death.
Today, seven years after the Tree of Life massacre, let us join with the poet Judith Sanders in her “Mourner’s Kaddish.” Listen as she invokes Hannukah’s miracle of lights and the other-side-of Jordan’s promise of milk and honey. Yet, faced with such evil, how can her tongue not cleave to the roof of her mouth? How cannot deep sorrow and distress silence us all?
Here’s “A Mourner’s Kaddish” by Judith Sanders with the epigraph “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land.
A Mourner’s Kaddish
-“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
We must have forgotten thee,
o Jerusalem,
because our tongues have cleaved
to the roofs of our mouths,
and our right hands
have lost their cunning.
Our temple has been sacked.
Only dregs remain
to sanctify the altar
and rekindle the eternal flame.
It would take
a miracle.
By the waters of Babylon,
we lie and weep
when we remember
that land flowing
with milk and honey
across the Jordan.
We were to row ashore
and dwell there
beneath our vines and fig trees,
our swords beaten
into ploughshares.
Instead,
carried to captivity,
required from us
is song.
Praise and laud,
exalt and extol,
with our cleaving tongues.
_____
Published on Vox Populi, on October 27, 2020, the second anniversary of the murders of eleven worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. This poem was written in memory of them.
https://voxpopulisphere.com/2020/10/27/judith-sanders-a-mourners-kaddish/
It also was published in Judith’s poetry collection In Deep, Kelsay Books, 2022.
That was “A Mourner’s Kaddish” by Judith Sanders. Thanks for listening.
Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox, Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can view more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
