BIRD MITZVAH
We rose unto the mountaintop,
to the aerie of the birds,
Tristram’s grackles,
the black, orange-tipped,
and brownish, wide-winged birds
hovering over the sacred site,
flocks swooping and dipping,
whistling, cooing and cawing,
settling here and there on the edge of
the restored walls of ancient rocks.
So curious at the boys with kipas,
and girls with head cloths,
gathered with and without prayer shawls,
speaking in memory of the past,
the 960 who chose death by suicide,
rather than lose their freedom,
to be captured Roman slaves,
and the seven—two women and
five children—who survived,
pardoned, whose descendants
perhaps are among these
bar and bat mitzvah boys and girls.
They recite prayers and famous sayings,
quotes from diaries and other writings,
and then read from the Torah,
each his and her portion,
while mothers and fathers, grandparents,
brothers and sisters and friends surround them
in a harmony of this ceremony of
entering adulthood as Jews.
And the birds continue to swarm
and hover wide-winged on sun winds,
flying back and forth, forth and back,
very, very curiously dipping in and out,
out and in, joining the cantillating and singing
with their whistles and coos and caws,
songs of sad remembrance and joy,
making their own bird mitzvah,
perhaps as spirits of those who battled and died,
here more than a thousand years ago.
—Stanley H. Barkan
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