The seder's order

Marge Piercy 1936 (Michigan)



The songs we join in
are beeswax candles
burning with no smoke
a clean fire licking at the evening
 
our voices small flames quivering.
The songs string us like beads
on the hour. The ritual is
its own melody that leads us

where we have gone before
and hope to go again, the comfort
of year after year. Order:
we must touch each base

of the haggadah as we pass,
blessing, handwashing,
dipping this and that. Voices
half harmonize on the brukhahs.

Dear faces like a multitude
of moons hang over the table
and the truest brief blessing:
affection and peace that we make.
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Written on 2006

Submitted by Drone232 on April 15, 2022

Modified on April 05, 2023

34 sec read
6

Quick analysis:

Scheme XABC CXXX XXXX XBXA XXCX
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 571
Words 114
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4, 4

Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, into a working-class family that had been hard-hit by the Depression. Piercy was the first member of her family to attend college, winning a scholarship to attend the University of Michigan. She earned an MA from Northwestern University. During the 1960s, Piercy was an organizer in political movements like the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the movement against the war in Vietnam, an engagement which has shaped her work in myriad ways. Perhaps most importantly, though, has been Piercy’s sustained involvement with feminism, Marxism, and environmental thought. An extremely prolific writer, Piercy has published close to 20 books of poetry and close to 20 novels. Her novels generally address larger social concerns through sharply observed characters and brisk plot lines. Though generally focused on issues such as class or culture, and usually written from a feminist position, Piercy’s novels have taken on a variety of guises, including historical fiction and science or speculative fiction. Her novel He, She, and It (1991)—published as Body of Glass in the UK—won that country’s prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award; an earlier novel of speculative fiction, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) has been credited as the first work of cyber-punk. more…

All Marge Piercy poems | Marge Piercy Books

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