Upstairs the Eulogy, Downstairs the Rummage Sale

-Yehoshua November

The beloved Yiddish professor

passed away on the same day

as the synagogue’s rummage sale,

and because they could not bear

the coffin up the many steps

that led to the sanctuary,

they left it in the hallway downstairs,

and because I was not one of his students,

and it didn’t matter if I heard the eulogy,

they told me to stay downstairs,

to watch over the body and recite Psalms.

And I thought,

this is how it is in the life and death of a righteous man:

upstairs, in the sanctuary, they speak of your heroic life,

while down below your body rests beside

old kitchen appliances.

And I recited the Psalms as intently

as I could over a man I had only met once,

and because I knew where he was headed,

and you and I were to wed in a few months,

I asked that he bring with him a prayer for a good marriage.

And this is how it is in the life and death of a righteous man:

strangers pray over the sum of your days,

and strangers ask you to haul their heavy requests

where you cannot even take your body.

A Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of Prairie Schooner's Bernice Slote Award, Yehoshua November has taugth at Rutgers University and Touro College. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Margie, The Sun, Provincetown Arts, New Works Review, The Forward, European Judaism, Praire Schooner, and other publications. And his book length poetry manuscript was selected as a finalist in the Autumn House Poetry Prize and the Spire Press Poetry Book Competition. He can be reached at yehoshuanovember@yahoo.com.