Poetry as Sanctuary
By Dina Elenbogen
When I run along the lake, I pass the bird sanctuary and think about how these beautiful creatures that return each spring have a name determined by their species. I have thought, too, about the children washed up on the shores of Greece after they escaped Syria in flimsy rubber dinghies and rickety fishing boats,
losing their names on the way to seek sanctuary. And I think, gratefully about the refugees to whom we’ve given sanctuary as a country, including my grandparents fleeing pogroms in Russia and Lithuania. I think, frightfully, of the current regime threatening to block our ability to give sanctuary to some of today’s refugees.
I think of how privileged I am to have the luxury to use the term
sanctuary
to describe the holy places in my life: family, home, friends, community, Lake Michigan, the Sabbath, Beth Emet and language. Since in this small space I can’t elaborate on each one, I will focus on Beth Emet and on language, which has often been a sanctuary for all of these things.
Beth Emet is the sanctuary where I raised my children. As I watched them grow as Jews and as human beings, I had the added reward of growing beside them. When we first walked in the door, I never imagined I could chant Torah or give a
d’var Torah
. But over the years, while spending many Shabbat mornings at Kahal, I evolved in my sense of belonging and in my knowledge. The encouraging words of a fellow
kahalnik
and my desire to serve my community, allowed me to reach the point where just this year, I chanted Torah and gave a
d’var Torah
. Now that my kids are older, Beth Emet has remained my family’s spiritual home where each of us has grown in inspiring ways.
There are moments when the things I go to for sanctuary fail me. Friends and family can’t always be there, doors close, occasionally it is too cold to visit the lake. Sometimes I only have myself. During these times and others, I turn to language. While it, too, can fail me, it is the sanctuary I have relished throughout my life. It is the place where I can explore, argue, praise, rant, and articulate the mundane and the profound. It is where I fight the silence that sometimes threatens to consume. During the profoundly difficult time we are facing as a country, poetry in particular has served as my sanctuary; it has allowed me to give a name to both the tragic and the beautiful. Below are two short poems about sanctuary and that in the process of writing them, provided me with sanctuary.
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I wrote the first poem when my son, Ilan, returned from Beth Emet's Fronteras teen immigration trip to the Mexico/Texas border, where they stayed in Cristo Rey Lutheran Church.
They Took Your Apples at the Border
you had carried them from Texas
to Mexico and back in a pack
so small and green most eyes
didn’t suspect you
had come to the border to listen
let your Keds sink in desert sands
like the stories of those who reach
for the doors of sanctuary
At 15 you let them in
share a stove fill plates with beans
and rice before the silence
rises with the next knock
at the midnight door
Garden of Everlasting Happiness
They say the Garden of Everlasting Happiness
should only be looked at from across the water
There are no bridges to take us
through shadows of untouched earth
Bonsai trees squat this August so finely sculpted
they protect the view
If once we were brave swimmers
today we are waders
Under uncertain skies planes take refugees
from hostile terrain to sanctuary
Once we saw The Statue of Liberty
from across water We didn’t touch
her outstretched arm
yet it looms above our days
Didn’t they
say
the garden
of everlasting
happiness
is just across
the shallow water?
We keep reaching from the other side
While brave geese skirt the water and land there
