Black and white photograph of Maia Evrona
One Way to Say Goodbye
He passes away while democracy falters
on its way to the USA, just before the holiday
for Hydra’s patron saint. The same
bells ring, the same processions are made,
the same these priests have been making for centuries.
The poets and writers and drifters of the sixties
are gone. No one plays a guitar under the pine tree
at Dousko’s now that the tourists, too, are gone for the winter.
The electricity he lamented and running water
have stayed so the few restaurants play
recordings of Bird on a Wire and Hey, That’s No Way
for me and the priests. Tea and oranges, flowers
and pomegranates multiply at his door. Who am I here,
a poet after the poets and writers and drifters
have disappeared? This is the way
I have always listened to Leonard Cohen anyway,
on my own processions through streets,
sitting in doorways under the moon,
alone in a room. Here are the rooms
where he wrote songs I traveled through
when I was sick for a decade, over the wall
is the terrace from the photograph I studied:
Leonard Cohen playing guitar in the eighties
after the other poets and writers, the drifters were gone,
Leonard Cohen singing to the rooftops, to the mountain.
© Maia Evrona 2021
Rosh HaShanah
(Rosh HeShone)To a new year that is good and sweet
with apples dipped in sticky honey
pomegranate seeds that stain—
the true fruit that tempted Eve.
For though we are imperfect and like she
we owe our own apologies, we may remain
another year in this messy world.
Surely even God must know
a sweet beginning is a sacred need.—Maia Evrona (First appeared in the Jewish Women’s Archive)
Poem of the Paper Bird
My paper bird is white as a dove.
My paper bird is graceful as a crane,
with its long paper neck and pointed beak.My paper bird has sight like a hawk,
and could give you a scratch:
a stinging paper cut.My paper bird has a song,
beautiful as a nightingale’s,
written on each of its paper wings.My paper bird has no iron-barred cage.
I keep my paper bird on my kitchen table
next to my paper rose.--Maia Evrona (First appeared in the 2011 Montreal International Poetry Prize Longlist Anthology)
The Symphony of Sickness
I wheeze when I try to breathe,
and my nose is so stuffed up
it’s been transformed into an instrument
in my symphony of sickness.
My voice has changed: always weak—
a mangled flute—
now it emerges thick
from my sore and scratched-up throat.
With my fever breaking, I can take off my socks
without my feet turning blue and hurting
with a pain that attacks and lasts like the sudden crash
and lingering vibration when cymbals clash.
What a switch! I am so acutely sick
that my chronic symptoms seem faded:
I could pretend they’re only noticed
in between my ordered sneezes.
But the foghorn cough that came and went,
the throbbing migraines and creaking knees,
the sounds that sound louder than they really are,
clanging against my raw and beaten eardrums,
never did sound like this coordinated affair,
with its conductor so present and focused,
the musicians operating perfectly
on cue.
The symptoms that have droned on
and come and gone, over the years,
sometimes louder, sometimes softer,
sometimes as only a memory
echoing in my ears,
have always felt like a cacophony,
so different from this
orchestra.
The Spirit Goes On Thinking
My spirit thinks like a steady clock
that never has to be wound.
It continues thinking, doesn’t stop
when illness drowns my mind in clouds.I no longer fear its musings gone,
aware that such meditations do go on,
ripple through some spiritual current
then wanderlike an orphaned boat on water.
Before any symptom lessens
poems may arrive on shore
full of referencesto an intricate, long-developed
school of thought,
volumes of tractates,
a bible.
I have a long scroll in my soul
filled with thoughts I cannot find
with my mind--a journal
my spirit is writing all the time.These words just now arriving
follow an entry on that scroll
written days and days and days ago
as my sprit went on ticking.--Maia Evrona (First appeared in Poetry East)
Poetry Publications:
(Click titles for links)
-“Days of Awe” and “Kol Nidrei II”
Berru Poetry Series, an online publication from the Jewish Book Council, September 13th 2021
-“Chanukah,”
101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium, Ashland Poetry Press, 1/1/2021
Ember; A Journal of Luminous Things
Mozaika Magazine; June 18th, 2020
Mozaika Magazine; May 2020
-“Rosh Hashanah” and “Yom Kippur”
The Jewish Women’s Archive, September 2019
Europe Now; June/July 2019
-"Purim-Shpiel,”
Jewish Currents, March 2019
The Coachella Review; Winter 2018
-"The Painting" and "Flowers and Wine,"
Gravel, September 2018
-"Kol Nidrei"
North American Review; Spring 2019
Daphne Magazine; Issue 05
-"Caminos de Sefarad"
Zona de Carga/Loading Zone, Issue Number 9, Spring 2018
Habitat Magazine; Issue 3, Spring 2018
-"The Birds of My Childhood" and "I, Maia"
Deluge; Number 10
One Sentence Poems, December 2017
*Also included in English and in Yiddish translation, in Radiant Jargon; Six Poems about Yiddish, an anthology of poems about Yiddish recently published by the Yiddish Book Center.
-"Adult Yiddish" and "Maia / מיה; Translation from Hebrew"
One Sentence Poems, March 2017
-"Childhood Spanish"
Poetica Magazine, Fall 2016
Valparaiso Poetry Review, Volume XVII, Number 2, Spring/Summer 2016
Story Magazine; Migrations Issue, Spring 2016
-"Vilna" and "In Yemin Moshe"
New South; Issue 8.1; Spring 2015
-"The Spirit Goes On Thinking"
Poetry East; Numbers 80 & 81; Fall 2013
-"Late Afternoon"
Prairie Schooner; Fall 2012
-"Poem of the Paper Bird"
2011 Montreal International Poetry Prize Longlist Anthology
Prizes:
2011 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize for "Over Jerusalem"
Listen to me recite some of my favorite poems on soundcloud:
https://soundcloud.com/maia-evrona
Late Afternoon
On Cape Cod
Shivering on this sandbar, I wait for my father
to notice the late hour: time to come
with the blow-up crocodile, the blow-up boat--
Time to take me back from here
where I’m stuck, held yet far off,
like the kites in the air,
and even if he carries me with my arms tight around him,
a film of salt and water will be between our skin
as the blow-up boat glides along empty in the sea.
--Maia Evrona (First appeared in Prairie Schooner)
Vilna
There was that strange scent both times I went:
almost unpleasant, kept me recalling
that blood once ran through the cobblestone streets
yet it was tender like grass in the rain.
Each time I arrived amid plenty of rain,
but I’m certain the days lasted longer
the first time, the first summer,
just as that month seemed longer
than when I went anywhere
again for a month, bled into the months
and the years I walked down after
those white evenings in summer.
--Maia Evrona (First appeared in New South)
Childhood Spanish
Language I learned en la escuela primaria,
en una programa bilingüe, language of homework
and a terrifying third grade teacher, language I feared
forgotten after every summer.
Language of nearly none of my ancestors,
except those fleeing Sephardim,
who dispersed in all directions
and, I’ve read, through all Ashkenazim.
Language once purged, still so Catholic,
school seemed parochial by mistake,
as if my native English needn’t be selective,
purged of Jew-you-down and good Christian praise.
Language that feels so American,
not the Russian, the German, the Polish
my grandparents’ parents fled Europe fluent in
and shed, keeping only Yiddish.
Language that confused my English pronunciation,
loosened my accent, further cultivated in me
the seeds of a rootless cosmopolitan,
even here, in the Land of the Free.
--Maia Evrona (First appeared in Poetica Magazine)
Hidden Yiddish
Perhaps there is memory growing out of oblivion,
a miracle happening on a journey,
as the nightingale sings an aching soliloquy
buried in the forests of Poland.--Maia Evrona (First appeared in One Sentence Poems, now available in English and in Yiddish in Radiant Jargon; Six Poems about Yiddish, published by the National Yiddish Book Center)
Kol Nidrei I
May it be played by Casals,
my beloved Yom-Kippur-goy
of the cello. Perhaps he also
has vows to renounce,
an ancestor forced to convert
rather than burn, forebears
who wished to return.
He’s summoning them now
with his strings, with his bow,
grieving them now.
First appeared in the North American Review
Kol Nidrei II
Or perhaps it’s most fitting played by Du Pré, her force
like an electric light sparking out. She who too
would come to know lack of choice,
as I do, as I recall strings like knives
slicing lines on my fingertips, otherwise
blue-tinged and numb, stiff as I tried
to learn the guitar; I with my lingering tremor,
who for years lacked strength to sit upright,
cradling a cello, to suspend a bow in the air;
I who still fail to fast lest my blood sugar fall,
lived in terror of plans and of promises, knowing all
vows may be broken when the body falls ill.
First appeared in the Berru Poetry Series
Flowers and Wine
You brought me flowers and wine
for my twentieth birthday,
flowers and wine
when I was still flowers to you.
I became wine:
neither sweet nor bitter but full
of the heady memory of sweetness
and bitterness,
the possibility of both.
I have seen how we, the haunted, the traumatized,
sometimes fill our glasses too fast to the brim,
clink them together too hard, making wine overflow,
searching in that complicated taste for sweetness,
searching in one another,
accustomed to the sweet accompanied by the bitter.
Sometimes I gulp down what I should sip,
as all of life rocks back and forth between seeming
like a fading memory,
and something terrifying, yet intoxicating.
I don’t know how one lives with the sobriety
of life that doesn’t attack
or why any kindness makes
my mouth fill,
as it fills all of a sudden
with blood when I bite my tongue,
fill with the bitterness I have choked down in my life.
I was always careful when you reached out your hands
not to hold them tightly in mine
but to only let my fingers rest
limply in them, like the stems
of freshly-cut flowers
due to the headiness of wine.
(First published in Gravel)
Portbou
To leisurely travel here to Portbou
where others have fled through.
To exist as a tourist in a world
full of others running for refuge.
And to stroll down the narrow
streets of nearby towns, drinking
chocolate, and notice the hollows
where mezuzahs were torn away from stone.
A few decades ago, in another century,
the refugee would have been me,
in another few years perhaps it will be.
Here I am admiring the sea. To be
a tourist can be a beautiful thing.
Strange in a world of tourists and refugees.
(First published in Mozaika)
Photograph of the cemetery in Portbou, Spain
Reading of the poem Chanukah on Youtube
“Chanukah” from 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium. Photo with candle.
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