December 2015
Kenneth Salzmann
kensalzmann@gmail.com
After a career divided between working in the arts and working for newspapers, I have arrived at a point where I can spend more time on my own creative work. While I’ve always written and published poetry, I’ve certainly never been as prolific before, and it has never been my primary pursuit before. These days, I live part of the year in Woodstock, New York, and part of the year in a magical pueblo in Mexico. 
Author's Note: While “Musaf” directly mimics some aspects of Jewish liturgy and draws heavily on Jewish images, I hope and have heard that it is nevertheless accessible to anyone who has looked out over a forest on a startling green day. It was born in a synagogue with windows for walls in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts. I think it may be about “the returning implicit in the going,” from whatever tradition or path.

​Musaf: Additional Prayer


Praised be the one
I have lived contentedly without;
who reveals the Berkshires today
are an unexpected house of prayer
and sorrow, as just one green month
rises to repair a broken circle; whose
search for me is unfulfilled
and perhaps not ended.

Blessed is eternal loss and glory, wonder of the universe,
splash of color slipping from a winter-weary wood
that I have often walked alone; blessed a father’s flight
that leaves a son with no direction to flee but back
along remembered village roads that run two ways
through dimming childhoods; blessed each step out
and each step back, the returning implicit in the going.

Blessed are the little-traveled village roads that carry
fathers and sons toward innumerable destinations.

Blessed are the four corners, and the fringes.

Eternal Mothering Presence, you coax Deuteronomy
from the gentle throats of Berkshire songbirds
and fly away; you clothe the naked birches
with the finishing touches of spring; you drop green vowels
on weathered wood until the world finds a voice
and whispers Shema; you make me a Jew.

Unending Adonai, help us to go on imagining
that, wherever we go, we have only missed you
by a moment; allow us our untenable conviction
that we might become a blessing.

Blessed Father, command us to be free.

-Originally published in Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude  Holy Cow! Press 2009




©2015 Kenneth Salzmann