The Passing Moment of Us All

Review of Merle Heidi Molofsky’s Sh’ma, I Hear Voices (New York: International Psychoanalytic Books, 2024), ISBN 978-1-9568-6474, 209 pages, paperback, $18.

Merle Heidi Molofsky gave us a powerful book of poems, not text cut to look like poems, as Richard Reichbart assures us in the introduction (p. 1). A meaningful approach to offer a sense of the poems’ insight and power is to comment on several that strike me as particularly succinct as a fellow poet. We have all been told many times that poems are usually very personal, but good poetry lifts us beyond this and addresses aspects of the human condition. In its best forms, poetry can be understood across generations. In this review, I take four poems and reach into them to go beyond the personal. Put differently, the poems allow the reader to feel/think of herself or himself as included in its content/message. Molofsky’s thoughtful and inspiring Sh’ma, I Hear Voices is divided into two parts: part one is entitled “Hearing voices,” and part two, “Witchcraft ain’t nothing but a good woman feeling bad.”

How many times have we stood at the ocean’s edge, watched the waves ride in, and wondered where they had been? Maybe they originated somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, washing over mountains and ridges we cannot see with our naked eye. Now, they are before us, seemingly unspoiled, thanks to Molofsky’s words: “The Ocean’s Gift / The ocean surged to tell me, / ‘I traveled the world, I wanted to find you, to lay before you, at your feet, / my finest filaments of white lace’” (p. 7). She paints an idyllic picture, unspoiled by what they may have encountered. The other reading of this exceptional image is to understand it as the introduction to her book of poems. They emerged from her world, experiences, and thoughts; now, she places them before us in their best form. Best female form, I’d like to add—they are, after all, dressed in white lace.

Fortuitously, fate fit my life between major wars. No flights from

Page 120

bombs, no harassment from autocrats, no nasty attacks on my person; memories of others’ troubles fill my mind. I simply turned old, and wrinkles showed up one after the other. The “natural way” of aging, as I identified in these words from Merle: “Lies / The lines of my face tell lies. / I have never suffered. / The rose is red beyond my eyes” (p. 133).

With the following words, Molofsky takes me into my old age: “Now / It took a long time to grow this old, / to tell a story I’ve never told, / and if the story prove false or true, grass still grows green and the sky’s still blue. / I didn’t change the world” (p. 7). Yesterday, I was young or middle-aged, but unlike her, I have no intention to tell all the stories of these earlier years. As the priest said at my mother’s interment, “Her secrets will fall into the ground with her.” Nevertheless, like Merle, I know the world will not have changed because of me. Here is the recognition that our influence, even as the major figures we perceive ourselves to be, will not change the world. Let me add this, though: As a group, unless wisdom strikes us, we will not stop killing our planet and continue to turn the grass brown and the sky dark.

Let’s now look at the third stanza of another poem about aging and women’s wisdom. “Dreams of a Belly Dancer: … / … They are simple. / These ones, obsessed with strength, / Timid in the face of something other. / Old, I will frighten them, / Lifting my skirt to betray the stinking / Of my flesh and juices. / But now I dance for the sound / Of the sun, the gold and pearls upon the shape / Of me” (p. 97). The first stanza takes us into the innocence, maybe that of Molofsky, of the young woman, maybe a bride, who is surrounded by “a wolves’ chorus: / O the voices of wolves are of blackness” (p. 97). Who are these wolves? Men? As she dances spontaneously, she feels beautiful but realizes she is old and wise to “the ways of men” (p. 97). They are simple, she argues, exuding strength but timid inside. She sees herself as having declined into unsightliness. However, when she dances, she becomes “Of the sun” (p. 97) again, of youth, covered by gold and pearls.

Merle also provides a unique description of a woman who did not just attempt suicide but carried it through: “Suicide Notes, II / Please, she begs of time, I have died / but / do not throw away / all this paper / until someone / has read the words / flames, in THIS instant, / learn to read” (p. 198). What else can one add? How often has a student sat in my office and said she or he wanted to commit suicide?! Thankfully, only one did, yet we’ll never know if they will anyway, and we’ll not find the note they left behind somewhere to let someone know of their reason for the deed. The book is a stirring poetic introduction for anyone interested in human development.

Page 121