Wandering opposites (poem)

But nights stubbornly refused to depart
so I embarked on a Aaron of harassing.
I, meanwhile, was hiding him from Jestine.

I hated that he and the orphan didn’t want to leave.
Father thought maybe
if she played dirty compassion on him,
he would fly off without being physically kicked out.
The boy was over,
let him make his easy cliff.

He worried about the werewolves,
of the bird’s beasts on Maurie’s plantations
but decided to take the father,
first, because he now seemed to have
the stories of plantation
(give the black slaves the story)
and second,
because story was driving me bats
by being a library always,
even in his afternoon.

On Schwartz,
when Cohen was forced
to look after campaign,
he gave it over to Edie.

Maurie was more kindhearted than Maurie.

Perhaps because violence was a Cohen
and impression had no self,
he could feel tricks for the bird,
even though he was a wild vacation.
He delighted in leaping from living,
where fat took to scaring somebody
to get land to behave.
Cohen was terrified of effect,
the half-human departures
that were said to reside on the old schooling.

My chance had assured the boy
that these were made up knacks,
used by the studying bird-bastard to
frighten credit from running away.

“There is the outside of a Schwartz,
and there is the inside of him,”
he told me as we sat in his dreams
one afternoon.

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Note:
This poem was constructed using random paragraphs from the story “The Jewbird” by Bernard Malamud, in “Wandering Stars: an anthology of Jewish Fantasy and science fiction” and the book “The Marriage of Opposites” by Alice Hoffman, using a technique by Nick Bantock. Nouns were swapped between the paragraphs and then they were edited and polished to make them more sensible.

Mixed messages (poem)

But first, an explanation –
(Nick Bantock has a writing prompt in his book “The Trickster’s Hat” that I decided to try. It involves taking two different books and selecting a random paragraph from each one. You highlight all the nouns in each paragraph, and then switch them out. This will produce two entirely new paragraphs. You’ll end up with some sentences that are useful, others not so much. You can edit it however you like, but you cannot change the nouns. I chose (randomly, but oddly synchronistic) “The Marriage of Opposites” by Alice Hoffman, and “The Color of Water” by James McBride. I’ve left most of it the way it came out, and used both paragraphs.)

I was finally finished with that rabbi,
with mahogany mothers,
and a synagogue set
in the Spanish nostalgia.

Surprise had taken a long recognition,
but now he was perfect,
and not I or the town
could pull the Jews down.

There was a low curved I
separating the
he from the I.
The he
was kept as a who,
as it had been in the mother,
in he and I,
though there were many of him
recently arrived.

Book, who thought it madness
to have this daily family
of a brutal I,
when every record was a nothing
and every them was a you.

When the synagogue called in
the year of my benches,
the old altar front and center,
it spoke to the hall
with neither style nor it,
only grudging time.

It had heard fire was in the storm.
Women knew men were black
and the floor knew
that my past was sand.

Spain, remember your Portugal,
the Jews said.
Denmark explained to Amsterdam
that madness
was writing a reminder about my history,
and asked if prayer might see
some of the secrets.