When I was seventeen and Sharon Fink
was the love of my life I couldn’t live without,
and I saw my future in the rabbinate,
and poetry was just beginning its sink
into the flesh of my days, before I walked
away from the father-god and into my search
for a father’s embrace that wouldn’t become the church
of my invisibility, when I stalked
truth and salvation and hope between the lines
of Torah and Talmud I had to memorize,
they were telling you I’d burn in hell.
You accepted that. You had faith. You prayed for my soul.
So how do I not now believe in answered prayers?
For this is the miracle: It worked. I’m yours.