The Book of Vashti

By Bonnie Lyons

(Esther 1)

Yes, you're Jews
but aren't you also women?
How can you celebrate Esther,
Mordechai's pawn, who only rose
to the occasion when he threatened
her personally. Until then, she was
content to remain Queen and blind
herself to the destruction
of the Jews.

Blind herself.
As you do now.

Read it again
but read it
as women:

We women were celebrating together
in our part of the palace,
when Ahasuerus, after seven days of drinking,
his heart "merry with wine"
ordered me to display myself
for the other men
like a whore.

When I refused,
he wanted to laugh it off
admit he was drunk and foolish,
but the other men, like all drunken men
in a mob, goaded him
to set the manly example.

And he did.
Banishing me and taking my lands,
jewels, and homes like a child
who grabs his playmate's toys.
The official account doesn't record
what happened next: how I lived
with the other cast-off women
in poverty and pride.

Yes, Esther, the fair young virgin,
using her beauty like a whore
conniving as a slave,
ensured the survival of the Jews
something temporary and local -
But even now
she blinds you,
binds you
to your weakness.

A Prayer for My Grandson

By Bonnie Lyons

He places anything resembling a cell phone
against the side of his head and listens,
and when his pudgy, dimpled finger fails
to awaken music from the iPad icon

his fist carries his mother's finger over, assuming
she has the magic touch.
For now she does: she adores her giggly
gorgeous black 16-month-old son.

But her finger can control gadgets, not people
and when at Arlington Vermont's "Norman's Attic"
(think Rockwell) street fair I buy him a handmade (in China)
sweater, his wary grandpa whispers, "His first hoodie."

Mother to Daughter (1960)

By Bonnie Lyons

Prepare your fortresses.
Our ancestors knew
not to let fingernail clippings
or hair fall
into the wrong hands.
And we know there must be
nothing as obvious
as cigarette ashes, book, or cushion
imperfectly placed.
No signs of untidy life
in house beautiful.

Now your armor:
First the concealed weapons.
Girdle and longline bra
and your girded loin to chest.
Next the crisp, coordinated outfit
with matching shoes and handbag.
Under your helmet of lacquered hair
put on your face.
Base, powder, lipstick, mascara
Now you're ready.

Dog Training

By Bonnie Lyons

Sometimes I think
the only lessons I ever learned
were from my dogs.
So here is the accumulated wisdom
of Sancho, Max, and Zorba,
three sage Airedales:

First, yelp when you're in pain
but let it go when it's gone.

Second, travel the earth
with a quivering nose.

Third, answer the needs of your body
with shameless relish
but then go right on
to the real purpose of the day: play.

And finally, whenever possible
leap right
into the arms of someone
who loves you.

Expensive Thrills

 By Bonnie Lyons

"Think of the thrill,” I said trying to persuade

my two best friends to rob the Chase bank

on 41^st Street we skipped past everyday

going to and from North Beach Elementary School.

“They don’t have our fingerprints yet and besides

we’re only nine. Even if we get caught, what can they do to us?”

I reasoned. We stole Clark bars, Hershey milk chocolate, and  Milky Ways

from Ligget’s Drugstore instead and made ourselves sick eating the evidence.

I never gave up this crazy plan. I told my sister

that when I too became a grandmother we’d go for it.

Two old ladies with eight grandchildren between us!

“If we get caught, we’ll start a book group

for our sister prisoners. What’s so bad about that?”

She laughed  at my absurd idea, of course, and then

it came to me: I cannot risk losing the thrill of holding

my grandson in my arms.  I give up.

Bonnie Lyons is a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio.  She has published three books of poems as well as a chapbook, including one collection of poems written from the perspective of the women in the Bible. 

Zipporah's Knife

That first night on the way to Egypt,
when we stopped to camp, his God suddenly
became murderous. Moses cowered not not knowing
what to do or what he had done.
In a trance, I picked up a flint
and cut the foreskin
of Gershom, our first born,
then placed the bloody bit
at his father's feet.
Later, when it seemed I was
waking from a dream, I tried
to make light of all that strangeness.
Laughing, I recalled my own wedding
night blood, and told Moses he was surely
my bridegroom of blood now.
I still do not know
what prompted me to do what I did.
But I knew I had done my part
and I returned to Midian exhausted.

Word of the divine events in Egypt reached us
and my father took us to Moses in the desert.
Now I was a stranger in an alien land
until Miriam told me
I was the fourth of the magic circle -
that his mother, and Pharoah' daughter, and
Miriam herself had all saved him
and I was welcomed and more welcome
among the women.

Deliverance: Pu'ah Explains

By Bonnie Lyons

I would like to tell you
I acted out of deep faith
or that God sent me a dream
to prophesy this helpless baby
would grow up to deliver us
all out of Egypt.
But I can't.

Year after year
Shifrah and I struggled
to help mothers push newborns
out of their bodies and
into the world.
Hour after hour
we used the secret knowledge
of our sacred calling,
gentle words of encouragement,
our own powerful hands,
Oh the joy and triumph
when a wet head finally
crosses over, the transport
in every mother's eyes,
pain behind her now.

Besides, Jochebed
was my neighbor: could I
kill her son?

Hebrew cries were camel grunts
to Pharoah's ears
so when we told him
our women delivered their babies
before we midwives could arrive
- that Hebrew women, unlike Egyptian women,
poured babies from their bodies
like wine from a jug -
that stubborn, distrustful, arrogant man
naturally
believed us.

Captain Midnight and the Evil Eye

By Bonnie Lyons

Back when prizes
beckoned to me from the back
of every cereal box
like Captain Midnight’s magic ring,
I tried to enter my Bubbe
in a grandma contest.

Her invisible stitches, airy blintzes,
and fourteen healthy grandchildren
were bound to hit the jackpot,
I thought, but she refused to tempt
the Evil Eye by numbering
her grandchildren.

The Evil Eye showed up anyway.
Cocaine, jail, pistols, morgues.
Her grandchildren’s lives played out
like soap operas. No moment of glory
for my world-class, champion Bubbe.
No Captain Midnight to the rescue.

Miriam Talks Back

By Bonnie Lyons

Against men
I have only the usual
womanly rage. Even in
their accounts I am
a prophetess, but where
are my prophecies recorded?
I am silenced and erased,
invisible and unheard.

But my argument is with you
who spoke to Moses mouth to mouth.
After you parted the Red Sea,
who took timbrel in hand,
led all the women in music and dance?
Who sang “Sing ye to the Lord,
for he hath triumphed gloriously”
to celebrate how you threw
Pharoah’s chariots into the sea?
You who love songs and again
and again commanded us to sing,
who cannot have forgotten –
have forgotten.

When Aaron and I spoke
against Moses’ marriage
to that Ethiopian woman
and said you spoke through us
as well as through him,
we believed we spoke the truth.
We felt infused with your spirit.

But you heard only pride
and struck me – only me –
white as snowy death
with leprosy. And when
Moses cried “Heal her now,”
Instead you ordered him to shut
me out of camp for seven days.

Leprosy and exile killed my young self;
seven days, all alone, I mourned her.
That’s when I became the prophetess
to women.

God of Miriam as well as Moses,
I will never stop disputing you,
wrestling with you until
like Jacob’s angel
you bless me.

Big Tex and the Battenkill Maiden

By Bonnie Lyons

August’s newborn twin calves are packing on the pounds
and the lush goldenrod is now a browning omelet.
Already the maples are busy making their gaudy costumes
for the fall spectacular. For their finale they offer their finery
to the air in the world’s best striptease.

Kingfishers, blue heron, jays, wild geese.
cawing crows and complaining catbirds.
Chests outthrust, the merganser families float by
in their own river parade. Paying no attention,
the turkeys talk over travel plans. Cedar waxwings
like once popular Saabs are out out out,
chickadees and Subarus, very in right now.

Fly fishermen in fancy outfits catch and release.
Poor farmers try to hold on, just hold on.
Eyes closed, head out the car window,
our Airedale exhales audibly like a true yogi.
Big Tex and the Battenkill Maiden,
rusty flatbed trailer and paint-peeling motorboat,
sit close together on the horse farm meadow.

My man is too trim to be called Big Tex
and I shed my maidenhead fifty years ago.
Clear Brook Farm will close on Columbus Day
and we’ll clear out soon after that,
traveling back from the Battenkill
to Texas like the birds..

Duclinea Tries to Comfort Don Quijote

By Bonnie Lyons

Back then,
with my full breasts
lean hips and full belly,
you loved my body
because it was beautiful.

Now when the downward
pull of gravity and the grave
have taken a little here
added a lot there,
you can love my body only

because it is my body.
Absurdly unexpected as all
these predictable losses,
we enter the real
age of romantic love.

Bon Voyage

This morning the aquamarine clouds
look like they've been dipped
in the Aegean. Soon that sea
will take you in its arms.
You'll look through air so clear
the world will seem perfectly
in focus. Rosemary breezes
will stroke you, roses and bougainvillea
foam off thick white walls.
Gnarled olive trees will teach you
how to age, and the sea will tell you
how not to.

The Handmaid's Sinai

By Bonnie Lyons

That day at Sinai only Miriam stood
with the bearded elders close to Moses.
The rest of the women were behind
the men hushing restless children,
and we handmaids
stood farthest away.

Together we stood transfigured
by the glorious encounter,
united into one people
accepting the covenant
that gave meaning
to our meandering lives.

Small and slight,
I could barely see
what was happening
and could not push forward.

Standing so far back
I could not help but notice
that while we were one people
we were still many people:
men and women, rich and poor,
powerful and powerless.
Those standing near the mountain
could see only the oneness.

Birthday Party

For Laura Kaplan Levin, 1946-1980

By Bonnie Lyons

When you open the door and turn on the light
all of us, friends and far-flung family
scream "Surprise! Happy birthday!"
and we eat and crack corny jokes
about your being over the hill at fifty.
You've recently decided to go gray
and there are tiny wrinkles at the corners of your
eyes.
The usual parts are beginning to sag
but mostly you look radiant.

That's how it should be
that's how I will it to be,
but no. On your fiftieth birthday
you have been gone sixteen years.
Your children approach your age.
Dead at thirty-three like Jesus;
a meaningless coincidence for a nice Jewish girl.
You'd hardly recognize me now, Laura.
All the wrinkles and gray saggy parts
I gave you - like the chicken pox -
they're all mine, of course.

Little sister,
I wanted to take the bullet for you
to be a wall, a moat, around you.
I never dreamed the enemy would grow inside you,
that someday I'd be old enough to be your mother,
that you could slip through my fingers like water.
Forever young, forever dead.
Absent presence, present absence.