A Literary Magazine in Support of the Jewish Community
Independence Day
May 14, 1948
And I was born three years
and nine days after. The next day
a war begins. The mandates
drawn on cartesian maps
in the disappearing ink of Biblical claims:
roads, valleys, vineyards, alleys,
and from every chimney-pipe
the smoke of a new Palestine
and a memory of Europe.
Once, we were all Palestinian.
My crib had been readied
for three years and nine days. My mother’s
many miscarriages passed through it
as if to mourn all the Shoah miscarriages
and all the Shoah
children flooding heaven.
We needed time for G-d to sort the souls.
My grandmother sang a Yiddish lullaby
and everyone cried and
cried to bring laughter to the bris.
They tried songs of the new pioneers
in Hebrew, the halutzim; laughed how much
they still sounded like Poland. I laughed, too.
We’re all native speakers of this sad laughter.
Owen Lewis
Owen Lewis is the author of three collections of poetry and three chapbooks, most recently Knock-knock (Dos Madres Press, 2024). His prior collection, Field Light (Dos Madres Press, 2020), was a “Must Read” selection of the Massachusetts Book Awards. Honors include the 2024 E. E. Cummings Prize, the 2023 Guernsey International Poetry Prize, the 2023 Rumi Prize for Poetry, the International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. At Columbia University, he is Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics and teaches Narrative Medicine. “Independence Day” is from his forthcoming collection, A Prayer of Six Wings (Dos Madres Press, 2025). You can find out more at www.owenlewispoet.com.
