The Alphabet
By Karl Shapiro
The letters of the Jews as strict as flames
Or little terrible flowers lean
Stubbornly upwards through the perfect ages,
Singing through solid stone the sacred names.
The letters of the Jews are black and clean
And lie in chain-line over Christian pages.
The chosen letters bristle like barbed wire
That hedge the flesh of man,
Twisting and tightening the book that warns.
These words, this burning bush, this flickering pyre
Unsacrifices the bled son of man
Yet plaits his crown of thorns.
Where go the tipsy idols of the Roman
Past synagogues of patient time,
Where go the sisters of the gothic rose,
Where go the blue eyes of the Polish women
Pas the almost natural crime,
Past the still speaking embers of ghettoes,
There rise the tinder flowers of the Jews.
The letters of the Jews are dancing knives
That carve the heart of darkness seven ways.
These are the letters that all men refuse
And will refuse until the king arrives
And will refuse until the death of time
And all is rolled back in the book of days.
Copyright Credit: Karl Shapiro, "The Alphabet" from Poems of a Jew. Copyright © by Karl Shapiro. Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates, Inc.
Source: Poems of a Jew (2003)