Yes, Happy Hanukah and yes, it involved a miracle, although it is a minor Jewish holiday, really, and one that grew out of civil war between factions of Jews, conveniently not too often mentioned.

The miracle of the title refers to a poem, though, by the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. Her debut collection of poetry, Eyes, Stones, was selected as the winner of the 2011 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, she has a new book coming out in 2020, and she currently teaches poetry at Juilliard.

Her small first poetry volume addresses the Israeli Palestinian conflict, by all reports from all perspectives, acknowledging the horrors lived then and now, Jewish and Palestinian; those poems were written a decade or more ago, I wonder how she feels now. Probably longing for a miracle of a different kind. Aren’t we all.

I chose today’s poem because it values connectedness. There are so many people out there suffering more than usual during the Christmas and Hanukah season from loneliness, isolation or simply the winter blues. A good reminder to ramp up efforts to reach out. It makes a difference.

Miracle

By Elana Bell

What else to call the way the bare branches
I’d bought at the neighborhood bodega
came back to life that winter.
I’d carried them home — dry, wrapped
in paper — stuck them in the square vase,
and, as an afterthought, filled it with water.

I don’t know when I noticed the pale
pink shoots sprouting from the submerged
ends: wild, reaching roots, like ginseng, or the hair
on an old woman’s chin. Then tiny green
leaves began to appear at the tips,
curling over themselves with the sheer effort
of growing.

I’d thought they were dead.

And now I recall being in the choke
of a fog I did not have a name for
and didn’t think I’d survive. I could try
to describe it for you now: the nights
I woke with my pulse pounding through,
the heaviness of each breath,
how the effort of being inside my body
felt like burning —

But what I really want to tell you is this:
how, in the parch of that long drought,
the people I loved kept bringing me water.

Water.

Though I turned my back, and did not answer
to my name, though I flung the cup away —

Let me say it plain: I wanted to die.
But something in me, some tiny bulb
still alive under all that rotted wood,
kept drinking, kept right on drinking.

Music today is a mix, dependent on your mood.

For the traditional ones: Gnesin’s Variations on a Jewish Theme

For the pensive ones: Bloch’s Sacred Shttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Agd4lN35ICwervice

For us anxious ones: the perfect eerie tones of Copeland’s Vitebsk.

You got three nights of Hanukah covered right there! Stay tuned. And now go, get some chocolate gelt for your’s truly….