I am numbed by the latest anti-Semitic attack in Pittsburgh.
My wife and I lived there in the mid-1980s, we have fond memories of the Squirrel Hill community. I have been struggling to grapple the enormity of this horror and write a meaningful letter to the editor in response, and will most likely fail.
Right now I grieve.
At the rate things are going, I truly fear we shall end up filling our calendars with the dates and times of death.
We need better objects to honor and share and place on our altars. I was reworking two poems — one on 9/11, the other a future submittal to Yeshiva University’s seminal journal PRISM. I am struck that both are poems of remembrance.
Nobody likes my long emails, so I shall end. Despite it all, we must somehow be able to come together and take the overpowering dark worldviews of death and promote the crucial values and principals devoted to life and hope. I cherish these principals. They seem especially important.
Stephen Cipot
Garden City Park