Gary Binowski and Vivian Barrett live 35 years beyond my sight,
past hope of recovery, the boy bouncing heel-to-toe to school
down Blake Street, the other sulkily switching her broom
of waist-length auburn hair, explaining yet again why she’s late.

And yet I revisit fifth grade, the class of Evelyn Maze,
who gave conviction — with pen — asked me to weave a tale
around the Frans Hals woman seated beside an apple barrel,
removed from the last century by canvas and still young before

our eyes. An oil becomes itself most when layers of paint still
bloom with original color. Teachers bind life to canvas of different
sort, air that’s backdrop for thought, that shimmers until sparks
ignite and cling to minds like lint to wool and seas to sand.

I see Evelyn still in the oddly similar short and steely form
of Carmen Santiago, my son’s middle-aged sprite, who mines
some special province for fairy dust, lifts kids to her height.
They think more of themselves because she said they could.

This poem first appeared in ForPoetry.com in 2001.

All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
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Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

That Sunday, a sharp sun exposed otherwise
unnotable, the Colts. They drew their footman

from his weekly rest, in crisp September air,
took their carriage downtown from an 89th Street

brownstone, to watch an afternoon’s entertainment —
foreigners, arriving from Ellis Island. The Colts,

gowned in ivory and gold, ladies’ feathered hats
bobbing in the breeze, gentlemen caped, strolled

the lawn of Castle Garden, laughed into their gloves,
circled a ragged troop babbling in a hundred tongues,

who stepped off ragged boats, and fell to ground,
weeping in accents thick as knives, Amerika!

This poem first appeared in ForPoetry.com in 2001.

All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

The huge band of black smoke broadens
Against an azure sky, how limitless grief.

No numbers yet number the dead, not ten-
Or thirty thousand, the still uncounted souls

Buried in a tangle of steel, a sea of glass, shoes,
Pens and ash. Whose papers — the pieces of lives —

Flutter in the wind, rising with acrid smells
That feel their blind way into our living room,

The eye-stinging scent of death? Yesterday,
The dark gray of pigeons gliding on a cloud,

Glinted silver in my net. That gray repeats, color
Of death, blown by great hatred, Satan’s breath.

This poem was published in The Pedestal Magazine in 2001.

All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

It is odd, how years beyond your death,
I remain loyal. Now when I think of our last
Goodbye — the hug that tempered your arms
With steel despite your failing health —
It renews my sense of goodness in you,
Friendship that could outlast a thousand wars.

How I loved you Chris, in a way befitting
Arab and Jew — though we did not see ourselves
As such, but set first and last about weaving
A tapestry of years and words, ideas, nothing
Else, pastel patterns of hope flickering in
The Camp David accords, your cigarette

Smoke, mood, like sips of chamomile tea,
To stoke omnipotent passion for language,
Type and print, poems, wind rippling
The Mississippi, on levees of the Crescent City,
Your raucous laugh and toss of hair, savoring
Each irony — small peace — praising life.

This poem was first published in July 2001, in Vol. 2, Issue 3 of Kota Press.

All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

for Christopher Nasri Khattar, 1951-1992
By Alyssa A. Lappen

It’s late. Life has blown so quickly by,
A gust of desert wind, a storm, puffed up
In moments, gone, the air just as suddenly clear.

But for the dune that was standing there,
The landscape has not changed. That mound
Made the shade where poets rested and friends
Talked until the early evening chill.

You are like that hill. It will be this different
If you die. I despair. There is so much to keep
You here, but cancer has its grip.

At noon, your encouragement faded to a mirage
In the blistering sun. But oh what memories,
Of conversations long into the night,
The lines discussed, the meanings undressed.

Your waif-like frailty takes my breath.
I almost fear myself a thief, who stole your
Muse when you most needed it, that unseen
Power, Who gives life, strength, love, decrees

That things be so. Is this possible?
Beloved friend, Please stay, and tell
me ‘No.’ You will live (I pray)
Or die, regardless what I say.

But know this. My landscape shifted the day
we first caressed sweet language. I am revived.
Our last visit stirred the poem I could not write.
It comes like the child I thought I could not bear

(Who now plays and sings at my feet), in one long
Painless shove, from the spirit, fathered by your
Thoughtful seed, filled with hope and prayers for you,
No matter where you are, no matter where you go.

Dedication to Christopher Nasri Khattar

Renewal has come to me many times, but perhaps most poignantly through my beloved friend, a poet, Chris Khattar. I am a Jew. Chris was an Arab. In November 1991, I took a long flight and a weekend away from my family. Chris was gravely ill. I had to see him.

Jewish theology requires small acts of goodness, which sometimes save lives—each life being considered as an entire world. This was such a mitzvah. In return I received one of the greatest gifts ever given to me—recovery of the poetic voice I had lost for 15 years. Chris urged me to write again; I asked him if he would love me even though my voice was gone. “I will always love you, no matter what,” he said. “But you can write. And it is a wonderful way to express your passions.”

A week later, I gave Chris a poem. In February, he was gone. His bone marrow transplant had taken. When his heart stopped, I was shocked—and wept as I had for my father 25 years earlier. Chris was just 40. In 1978, Chris and I had shared tears of joy as we watched news of the Camp David peace accords. Saying Kaddish—the prayer of mourning, in praise of God, of life, of peace—seemed eminently appropriate. For in his priceless gift to me, Chris lives on.

Now I find myself saying Kaddish again—for peace itself. Next to God and Jerusalem, the thing most central to Judaism is peace. Our fervent prayers for peace—embodied for millennia in every Jewish prayer, every one—again go begging, when they seemed at last so close to fruition. We find our homeland immersed in another war, the sixth in Israel’s short life—offers of peace scorned, by thousands of attacks in Israel and hundreds more world-wide since September 2000 and threats of further violence to Israel through the use of weapons of mass destruction.

Mourning, however, does not permit us to let our light be extinguished. Now especially I think of Chris—and the example our deep and lasting friendship set. I pray for a peace peace built one friendship, one world, at a time. Once again, saying Kaddish seems appropriate: Hope lives, so long as there is life.

This poem and dedication were first published in Spring, 2001 in Vol. 2, Issue 2 of Kota Press.

All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

for H.H.
By Alyssa A. Lappen

Magic, she said it was magic when
his soul escaped the body, which soon
grew hard, cold. He was gone, “Like that.”
She expects him back, endlessly. “He’s not

here, but where did he go?” She asks.
As if I could answer. Nowhere, somewhere
she can’t see. She woke the kids to share
their father’s end. Sitting with him

Made it easier to know he’s gone.
“A life left,” she said, “the same
way a life is born.” A door closed
that once was opened. This mystery

puzzles me. How does she go on.
How did I. Not having felt the universe
shift the second my father left the world.
I haven’t heart to say how absence scabs

and bleeds again, no heart to say what
she already knows: His exit was magic,
but the door won’t close. She will stand
in the jamb calling “Where did he go? Why?”

This poem was first published in December 2000, in Vol. 1, Issue 5 of Kota Press.

All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.