The Old Pastor and the Rabbi

THE WORD DERIVED FROM THE HEBREW

HEI LAMED-KEF, MEANING TO GO, TO WALK

The old pastor poems.

That would be one way to look at it now.

The way he handed me his library

one book at a time. Those prophets

make sense to me, I understand them,

I said to him, and he handed me

Volumes I and II, by Abraham Heschel.

Was the cover blue, a dark blue

in that traditional cloth binding

of the early 60s? Walking

across Edmund Pettis Bridge

the Rabbi felt his legs were praying.

Jim Bodeen

28 October 2017