A poem prompted by reading Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg's midrash on Rebekah and Rachel, a family birth, fears for the future with the New Year just on the horizon and the abiding inability to deal healthily with the past in this part of the world.
What binds us to what was,
Or what is yet to be?
Is it life-giving,
Or necrotic,
Poisoning both?
There comes a time
After the agony of emergence
That the cord must be cut.
Only then can both survive
And thrive.
A scar will remain.
A memory of the unremembered,
Both nurturing and traumatic,
Both nurturing and traumatic,
Too often disregarded
As a focus of selfish contemplation,
Seeing oneself as the centre of the world,
Yet actually a relic
Of dependence and devotion.
But there is no going back
Nicodemus was right in that.
A new connection
Must be made and tended.
But first, cut...
But first, cut...
Selah
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