Yesod sh’b Netzach*
  “You shall proclaim [with] the shofar** blasts, in the seventh month, on the tenth of the month; on the Day of Atonement, you shall sound the shofar throughout your land.” Lev-24:9 (Emor)
Torah says it, as do some
of the most way-out-there cosmologists—
Everything is happening all at once.
Including every kindness,
her hand pressed against the top
of my head, my mother, recalled each time
I don my kippah so I can pray or study
Torah and read the holy legal texts including

every God-commanded punishment, which reminds me
of Aziz* whose legs are shackled to the floor
in the room where he meets his lawyer,

but he can pull the stump of his right leg
from the locked-down prosthesis to show her
how worn the stump-sock has become—“the GTMO*
guards will not replace it…”

which I read right after the Torah commentaries
on teshuvah* and the shofar this sunny morning
misty with the promise of rain, and the dream
of infinite love I cradle along with my fury,
and this command in the ancient text to shout loudly—to “sound
the shofar!”—root of my faith that helps me endure. 

May I lift all this up—
the confusion, the howling pain, the dreaming,
the love—and shout
and shout aloud.
                                                                                      5/8/2017
                                                Connection w/in Endurance*
**Notes: Guantánamo (GTMO) Bay Prisoner Abdul Naji Aziz was forcibly repatriated to Algeria, in July 2010, after 8 years at GTMO.  He was reimprisoned in Algeria and received a 3 year prison sentence on spurious security related charges, which he feared would happen and is the reason he sought asylum in Switzerland when his lawyer, Ellen Lubell met with him.  I can find no further  information on his status beyond 2013.
      ”Ellen Lubell: A Shackled Prosthesis,” The Guantanamo Lawyers—Inside a Prison Outside the Law, Mark P. Denbeaux & Jonathan Hafetz, Eds,  NYU Press, 2009, p. 139 & https://www.andyworthington.co.uk/index.php?s=Aziz.
     *shofar—Jewish ritual instrument made of a ram’s horn, sounded on multiple sacred occasions including Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
    *teshuvah—Hebrew word for turning to the Presence, which informs the process of repentance in the month of Elul which precedes Rosh-Hashanah & Yom Kippur