Parker Sera
Mourner’s Kaddish for Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Read the news while scrolling on the toilet
Always remember the moment descending the stairs to ask someone if they have read the news
Google “blessings for erev rosh hashanah” like you were about to
Google “mourners kaddish”
Sit very still so that the world’s end will not find you
Sit very still and only imagine the kingdom;
Pure and golden, the bulb of honey sitting on a spoon
The honeycomb in the bowl awaiting apples and sweetly
ripped hand-crushed clouds of bread;
The world to come; our words and our following actions pregnant with it
may the world to come drip from our mouths like honey, and may we store it in the walls
The honey, harvested by a friend just this afternoon from an abandoned house
They have made a life of growing and coaxing—food from the earth, art from the hivemind
And today, they gently unstuck 25 lbs of this honey from the skeleton of the house, just before demolition—they relocated the bees
They brought the honeycomb back to our home
6oz of sweetness to the ritual
The world to come;
In the kitchen, modest piles of baked goods for tomorrow’s bake sale/yard sale/and reparations fundraiser
Tomorrow during our bake sale, as neighbors daven on their porches
some men have said they will come to our neighborhood, “a hotbed of antifa”
they will therefore be staging a hate rally at our local farmers market;
I will be there
but with honey dripping from my mouth.
Though I have endless rage I have no more left for tomorrow, I will be there and I hope no one dies
Light candles even though the wind will swiftly blow them out
Sing the blessings even when you only half-know them
May her memory be a blessing
And not only hers but may all their memories be a blessing
May we find comfort in their memories
May we find justice in their memories
May we know that in this time
When so many lives are ending
When trees are ending
When many hopes are ending as timelines and countdowns prescribed to us by climate scientists end and end
May we know what else is ending and may we hasten it to its end
May its memory be a blessing
May its ashes nourish the soil and awaken the seeds
Very soon, in the Synagogue without walls, we will beat our breasts with slow deliberation, in acknowledgement of our grief
in acknowledgment of what we all have done
all of us
I could say this kaddish every day;
I should
Yitgadal v’yitgadash shmei raba b’alma di-v’ra
chirutei, v’yamlich malchutei b’chayeichon
uvyomeichon uvchayei d’chol beit yisrael, ba’agala
uvizman kariv, v’im’ru: amen
A better world is possible. V’im’ru: amen
“May we establish that kingdom in our lifetime and during our days,
and within the life of us all
Speedily and soon”
And the world to come, as for that world,
We must take fistfuls of honey and ashes
and we must build it
—Submitted on 11/13/2020
Parker Sera’s work has appeared in The Rising Phoenix Review, Knack Magazine, and the Aurora Review, as well as in the anthology 11/9: The Fall of American Democracy (Independently published, 2017), edited by Casey Lawrence. Parker is a queer, midwestern horse girl, poet, actor, and theatre-maker from Minneapolis. She lives in Philadelphia, where she’s working on her MFA in acting at Temple University.
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