As Long as We Can Put Nutmeg in Our Coffee: An Ode to the Holy Land

-KJ Hannah Greenberg

As long as we can fill up our gas tanks,

Put nutmeg in our coffee,

Preview Hesder, Climb Masada,

Dip Yam HaMelech, traipse sacred waters;

We’ve secured life’s prize.

Our Old World-sized washers might

Make subsisting in this land

A change from former incarnations,

But black hats mixed with knit kippot

Serve our self-concept best.

Jerusalem’s variegated blue

Firmament differs, genetically,

From skies over Europe,

Plus North American heavens;

It sings the body better.

Here, we laugh lavender because

The Dead Sea, by dint of the Kinneret,

Satisfies doctors, teachers,

Rabbanim and cellists;

Together we build purposeful habitation.

Israel’s light, sweet babies’ round

Augur belies “superficial” altercations.

Decreased water tables or resident

Aliens are laughable during daybreak;

Our spiritual topography remains intact.

Aroused, also at times ashamed,

We locals attach hope,

Dream of functioning toilets,

Next to our piled laundry; Sometimes it’s

Dirty chores that shore up a nation.

They don’t seem much, our weathered

Stones, yet everything grows

From center. The Universal One Knew

We’d dread, trust, need, love, accept

Our onyma from Shemyim.  

Once a rhetoric professor who wrote for periodicals like The American Journal of Semiotics and The Massachusetts Journal of Communication, and spent National Endowment for the Humanities money in places like Princeton University's Classics Department, Channie Greenberg is now a committed creative writer who tramps across genres. Currently, she is the creative nonfiction judge for Notes & Grace Notes, the “Old/New World Discourse” blogger for The Jerusalem Post, the “Teen Stage” blogger for Type-A Mom, and the power behind Expressively Yours Writing Workshops®.

Her most recent work has appeared in: Doorknobs and Bodypaint, Fallopian Falafel Zine, Hamodia, Joyful! Mishpacha’s Calligraphy, Mishpacha’s Family First, The Clarity of the Night, The Externalist, Tuesday Shorts, and Unfettered Verse. In the near future, her articulated irreverence will be published by: AlienSkin Magazine, AntipodeanSF, Bewildering Stories, G. Stern’s Hag Samaiach Anthology, Ken*Again, Literary Mama, Mom Writer’s Literary Magazine, Morpheus Tales, Poetica Magazine, The Blue Jew Yorker, and The Mother Magazine.