Texts to the Holy
Poems
by Rachel Barenblat
$14.95
- Additional information
- "Your Voice Knocks"
- "Texts to the Holy"
- "Spring"
- "The One Who Sees Me" (video)
- Advance Praise
"Your Voice Knocks"
When I wake
your name is honey
on my lips.
All day long
you’re with me.
My heart rests
in your hand.
I am safe
in your embrace.
You know
my innermost parts.
Nothing I say
nothing I am
could drive you
away from me.
Your voice knocks.
Like a magnolia
I open.
"Texts to the Holy"
Shechina is riding shotgun.
Her toenails are purple.
She’s tapping at her smartphone
sending texts to the Holy One.
What’s it like, I ask her,
being apart? Do you wake up
melancholy and grateful
all at once, and fall asleep
thinking Shabbes can’t come
soon enough, is always too short
you’re always saying goodbye
and your own heart aches
to know he’s hurting too?
And she looks at me
eyes kind as my grandmother
and timeless as the seas
and says, you tell Me, honey.
You tell Me.
"Spring"
When I remember you
my fingertips tingle.
I’m a lilac, petals
prickling to spring free.
Yearning tangles my tongue.
My words become fragrance.
My heart overflows
like a wadi after a storm.
The thought of you
nourishes me, dizzies me.
Breathe into me
and I bloom.
"The One Who Sees Me" (video)
Advance Praise
Rachel Barenblat’s Texts to the Holy bridges the human and Holy, so that we realize the bridge is really just an illusion to get us to realize that the human is itself Holy—“Bless the One Who separates / and bridges. Even at a distance / we aren’t really apart.” And yet, in every honest line, she also comforts us in the uncomfortable knowledge that realization does not exactly bridge the unavoidable separation from That to which we are so close, and that sometimes, “yearning is as close as you get to whole.” The Ba’al Shem Tov or the Aish Kodesh couldn’t have said it better.
—Netanel Miles-Yépez, translator of My Love Stands Behind a Wall: A Translation of the Song of Songs and Other Poems, and co-author (with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi) of A Heart Afire: Stories and Teachings of the Early Hasidic Masters.
These poems are remarkable, radiating a love of God that is full bodied, innocent, raw, pulsating, hot, drunk. I can hardly fathom their faith but am grateful for the vistas they open. I will sit with them, and invite you to do the same.
—Merle Feld, author of A Spiritual Life and Finding Words
These are simple poems, radiant with joy. There is nothing clever or snide about them, no giving-only-to-take-back: the speaker of these poems is in it for keeps.
When it comes to you, dearest one,
I am profligate with promises…They are not — and do not pretend to be — artless: but they have a hard-won simplicity, poetic and spiritual. We are here to celebrate love, to celebrate wanting and being wanted, seeing and being seen. There are moments of tender humor, that might verge on blasphemy to those who do not take immanence seriously:
Suddenly though among strangers
I am not alone. You are with me.
Your emoji and your texts
—they comfort me.But Barenblat takes immanence very seriously. The conflation of the divine and the beloved is not a device or a conceit, in these poems: it’s just the truth, as seen by a veteran, disciplined contemplative.
It is you who wipe
tears from my face
with tender handswho remind me
I deserve better
than desolationTo read these poems is to take up the challenge of being this vulnerable, and this much in love.
—Dale Favier, author of Opening the World