Can it be? Such a stunning shock?

A Poem and a Curse

David Eidensohn

A Poem and a curse?

A poem is a song of the heart,

Joy and happiness, to sing and laugh,

How can I talk about curse when I talk about a poem?

But there is for everything a time, a moment of its own,

When we see what we see,

And are stunned, and we groan,

How did this happen?

How did somebody so respected and important,

Jump into hell?

Ask not me, but Yechiel Kailish and Simcha Felder,

For years shining lights battling evil and winning,

And both of them, when it came time to choose between heaven and the Assembly of a powerful government,

Chose to be an Assemblyman in hell.

The newspapers around the country trumpeted the news.

Outrage and ferocious attacks followed,

More and more,

And things are going to get worse,

Not better.

One question I ask of the two of them,

What do their children and families say to them?

Are they still on speaking terms?

Or when they speak,

Do they tell it like it is?

As I do when I talk to them or about them.

Two people with everything: honor, money, prominence,

Whose future was only about more honor, more money, more prominence,

Now walk into the Assembly with the pace of a warrior,

And return home to children and family.

And?????

To conclude,  on a fact,

If either or both of them, Kailish and Simcha, become gay,

That will be an improvement.

Because  people will at last realize that no rabbi can believe in heaven,

and deny the passages in Vayikro18 and 20, that sodomy is a capital crime.

Rabbi Eidensohn is a winner of national and international poetry contests for other poems. This poem was written just today.