From Within the Penumbra-Introducing the poetry of Geri Lipschultz
All we have is poetry. You have heard me say it before. Geri Lipschultz has had a long career of writing and teaching fiction, but on October 7th 2023 found herself turning to poetry. And though her poems are a bit unorthodox, when I read them I felt that an angry and plaintive voice; a voice that exactly matches this moment, a moment of helplessness and despair. Standing within the shadow of an eclipse. The penumbra.
Agon
The story of the end of a world.
The greatest story ever told.
It happened on a rainy day.
All good horror stories happen on a rainy day.
But it was no ordinary rain.
A rain of blood.
It was a rain of electrified bodies.
A thunderstorm.
The thunder was not so loud as the screams of the people.
A symphony rich in sound like cars in traffic blowing their horns.
It was like the bleating of a hundred billion sheep.
All looking for Bo Peep.
And the smell was the smell of an unburied death.
It would make the men's bathroom look good.
And everything left for the hands to touch turned to dust.
A most undervalued commodity.
It was to be expected.
It was ordained.
Those who survived lived not on water, not on bread, slept not, ate not, saw not, heard not.
Those that survived no longer survive.
There were no oceans.
Nothing to drown in.
There were only bones.
Fossils for the next world.
The mountains were lowered.
Everything was made equal.
You could not tell the ground upon which you walked.
A kind of unity.
There was no day, no night, no stars, no sun, no moon. It was a very dark darkness.
The darkness of truth.
There were no animals.
Nothing to bite into you.
No plants.
Nothing to trip you up.
There was not one living soul.
No one to kill you.
How to Achieve Immortality in the 21st Century
With all the prized inventions in fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, great Peace, and the relatively new economics, what can you do to make a grand, noble contribution to humankind?
Can you make a sweet end to all war? Or find new ways to blow up the family of atomic parts? Can you invent Radium? Argon? Radioactivity in general? Do you know much about hormones? Vitamins? X and Gamma Rays? Don't you have theories galore? A money theory? A quantum theory? An actual wireless? Theories about allergies, nerves, enzymes, brains and cells? Theories consequential in lasers, computers, copy machines, bombs, light and human rights?
Do you see some beauty, truth or useful thing to sculpt or paint or write or sing?
Maybe you can have a baby? (Oh, to rekindle, mother, nurture the sperm of Einstein, Galileo, Shakespeare, Socrates, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Bach, Beethoven, Rembrandt, Brahms, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha.... Or would you want one of your very own to carry your name along the way of the DNA?)
But what if there's no insurance that any of us will live even one more day? What with nuclear waste, pumping smokestacks, grime grips husband, slays lover, strangles wife, poisons children, all watch, prey to purse robbers, chain snatchers, slashers, terrorists, smiling rapists, and world leaders of world doom, while we stuff our faces with blue jeans, plastic wrap, medicine cabinets and so on?
What if we pretend that we are all one family, no matter what the scientists will trace in the gene?
What if the hereditary and congenital factors are not as important in character forming as the factor of love, which is delivered at seeming random, like a great gift of genius.
What if love, like a great gift of genius, is not a thing to be spotted on the DNA?
What if love is the DNA?
And the DNA is just a kernel of the plant, and the plant is just a sample of the race, and the race is just a star, and the sky is just the endless love that shall be around when everything else dies?
What if love alone can never die?
The Jew in Me
I
is reading, feeding on those
closer to what is
happening, the words
of those who have history
at their fingertips, have
a current practice of the
faith, but the Jew in
me goes deeper than
anything I might
repudiate or question
the Jew is marked
with an almost
invisible mark …the
Jew whose roots
are cut and cut
again—the only
home a Jew has is
where she goes when
they’ve killed her
and on the other hand
give a Jew
a homeland and
she will forget
she was meant
to be abject
and she will
act as though
it really is hers
somehow
the Jew seems
to be a handy
person to hate
of course
the Jew herself
also hates but
mainly
first and foremost
she hates
herself
II
The Jew
spins
a web
and in it
she traps people
who ask her
why she thinks
people hate
the Jews
III
The first word
I hung onto
was untenable
that I held tight
for the day that
stretched out to a week,
and then it morphed
into the word nuance
and now, it’s just
a thud
a throat
tight
a mouth
closed
a body
cold
and
in pieces
that I cannot
feel 
Mountain Benediction
Let love always be with you
and light shall shine
upon you
so long
as the spirits
of swans
and bears and snails
hover over you,
so long as you accept
each turn
of faith's road
and do not resist it,
do not fight it
as others are obliged
to do,
others who are living
in the
world of the actual,
the world
where the dollar completes
the man
and the man
completes the woman
and when all else fails
it is a world
where the self
completes
the self.
So long as
you dwell
in the unseen world,
the world underneath
the superimposed
material,
the world
of the unspoken
unwritten,
the world
within the penumbra
of all being
the world
that all of the other worlds
have sprung from,
but that
nobody believes in
except
for just a little bit
and ashamedly so,
but the world
that everybody
had once believed in
and had acted upon
and the world
that whether we like it or not
we are all
a part of,
each one of us
and it isn't in the synagogues
or churches or temples or mosques,
not really
and it isn't
in the skyscrapers,
nor in the coins
or in the cards
nor in the
minds
of psychiatrists,
although it is difficult
to manage
with the powers that be
but so long as
you remain steadfastly
a part of this world
an invisible world,
you will remain
protected
against all pains
and terrors
and afflictions
of an earthly
kind.
Amen
and women
and children.
Ah
them.
Twice a Pushcart nominee, Geri Lipschultz has published in Terrain, The Rumpus, Ms., New York Times, the Toast, Black Warrior Review, College English, among others. Her work appears in Pearson’s Literature: Introduction to Reading and Writing and in Spuyten Duyvil’s The Wreckage of Reason II. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. from Ohio University and currently teaches writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College. She was awarded a CAPS grant from New York State for her fiction, and her one-woman show (titled ‘Once Upon the Present Time’) was produced in NYC by Woodie King, Jr. Her novel, Grace before the Fall, will be published by Dark Winter Press in September 2025.
Delights!
Five Tiny Delights
1. Hearing my grandson call me by the name he uses for me in that singularly sweet, insistent voice of his.
2. The way people in this part of the country not only look at you but also wave from their cars when they pass by.
3. The uncharacteristic patience of my dog who will quietly sit in the middle of our walk, as I stand in front of the small beech tree and listen for the sound when the wind rises up and creates a small quiver to the still hanging curled-up, dried-out leaves.
4. That moment, when making a fire in the fireplace, that you realize you are free, at least for a short time, to just watch.
5. A rock that calls out to me on a walk, that I pick up and carry
Five Tiny Jewish Delights
1. Listening to the music box play Mah'Otzur... on my mother’s large silver menorah before the candelabra itself mysteriously broke in two.
2. The story of Tamar.
3. Chopped liver the way my mother would make it, with the fresh, finely cut raw onions, and the curved chopper with the red handle and the wooden bowl, both used only for this dish and no other.
4. The book of Jonah, especially the parts about the whale and the worm.
5. Watching the Hanukah candles, the dancing flames, and the plumes of smoke that swirl, disperse, fall silent, and disappear.