Composed for How Desolate Lies the City: South Side Tisha B’Av (Chicago, IL; July 31, 2017), this poem interprets chapter four of Eicha in light of the starvation of resources facing our public school system.
A lamentation poem, based on Eikha, chapter 5, on today’s Chicago, by Stephanie Friedman: “Whatever we imagine renewing, we must imagine anew. The sanctuary we would rededicate, the city we would rebuild, will not be some prelapsarian state to which we will be passively restored…”
In our day, we consume a voracious amount, without much thought to how each act of consumption could reveal our relationship to both the physical and the numinous worlds. Does this make us like Nadab and Abihu, offering an unscripted pan of incense in either our ignorance or our arrogance, ignoring the order of things as well as the necessary physicality of the gift that would connect us to the One beyond, thinking that an odor alone will do?
Stephanie Friedman relates on the alienation of cities prefigured by Cain and alternative paths to vital cities whose citizens are their brothers’ keepers.