The Language of Longing

Reflections as we approach the Jewish New Year

We are approaching the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. Along with Yom Kippur and the ten Days of Awe between them, these are our days of reflection, of atonement, of returning to ourselves and to one another.

I wrote this piece last winter for our local Jewish publication, but it feels fitting to share this time of year. I hope you like it.

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Across the street from my house is a towering sugar maple, its leaves gone gold for the season. In the morning, when I turn to face it, I get pangs of gratitude that feel almost immortal, creaky and ancient. Whenever I have gone in search of the divine, I have found myself instead face to face with the earth, and all the beauty that fills me with longing. I’ve found myself face to face with poetry, too.

Longing has many forms—love, wonder, grief, curiosity, even teshuva (the Jewish concept of returning, repentance, amend-making). It’s the wish to see the soul of a moment, to hear its voice, and to respond with our presence.

Sometimes that presence is enough to fulfill longing. When my wife and I light our Shabbat candles each Friday night, it is as a hearty, heavy exhale. At the end of all our busyness, my family huddles together around a fluttering light to say our blessings, to rest and to connect and to look each other in the eye more thoughtfully. So the yearning for this moment is complete.

Other times, there is nothing to fulfill and our longings go unanswered—chronic pain or illness, the uncertainty of living through a pandemic, the loss of a loved one. As my son nears his first birthday, I wish more than anything my grandmother could celebrate him with us. She passed away last year, a couple months before he was born. Some yearning is meant simply to be kept there, tucked quietly beneath the breastbone, to be felt and remembered, and that is the best we can do.

Poetry, I’ve found, is the language of longing. It’s the work of a person who turns to face their own hunger without ambition to crush or control it, but rather to see it, to treasure it, to learn from it, and perhaps to satisfy it on the way.

I write poetry for a living now. And while it’s nice to pay bills doing work I love, I’d keep writing regardless of whether or not it was practical, profitable. Creating space in my life for poetry, reading and especially writing it, is among the most precious of my spiritual practices. It’s challenged me to not look away from my longing, or yours. It has taught me to befriend my own darkness, to hold my anxiety with peace and patience, to have courage to make amends, love to give a complicated world.

As these days get shorter and nights get longer still, as we muddle through these cold months and contend with all our troubles, I wonder: What might it ignite in us to make a little room each day for a poem?

And in the deep night
we light a candle & watch it
flicker, small & steady.
It is no sun—no wild inferno.
But it illuminates our skin as we
rest, your forehead against mine.
In the fluttering light we
see, if nothing else, each other.
until the morning comes,
That is enough.