Yom Kippur

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I found this poem, written what feels like a lifetime ago, when I lived in another place, with another man, with other sins. Reading it makes me feel like I've come a long way in the years since. 

May you have an easy feast this year. 

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Yom Kippur, 2001

They might as well have hurled the stones at each other:

the intent was to wound.

A ceremony of forgiveness,

the secular Jew seeking the trappings of faith

to ease her troubled mind:

throw the rocks into the sea

and, with them, the things you need to let go.

She threw first,

a safe one, troubles at work,

nothing to do with him.

He started at a distance, too,

though not so far,

mother-anger.

It didn't take long and she was crying,

he was red with hard set jaws.

Anger and hurt,

his harsh words and her thin skin.

As suspicious of each other

as of strangers.

In the end,

she was alone. She wrote her fears into the sand,

and watched the sea wash them away,

wishing it were that easy.