Golem 2

Elisha Aaron

Along the thin
dusted line and
out of the unfolding
blue rolls a becoming
heap. Clay thumbed into
a gliding thing. Swiftly more
and across a trembling line
the thumb and a few fingers
prod. It grows. A ball. Two.
Stacked. It needs more than
muddied grooves. Whispers
at first purge the dust layer
and the tongue that slips them
waters the stack into a form half
cleaned. Whispers increasingly
channel and knife themselves
from a stream to a river digging
into the clay a torso, arms, legs.
A voice demands. The speaker
cannot help but become a gushing
current and muddy. Vibrant words
break further into the shapeless heap
shivering out hands, feet, a neck, a head.
Faster and louder the voice rises and its banks
cannot bravely hide the ranks of soil lost, soil that
grows the clay further, with human accoutrements. Chanting.
A constant jet-stream. Blood gasping in newly tubed veins. Almost
life. The frantic voice tranced. Rising. Rising! Demanding a stumbling
thin soul. Animated but not quite human. The voice slants over the rushing
waves, limbs swinging elliptically and hypnotically as the unreal unravels into the shadow self.

Look! Look! There upon that mundane patch!
We have dared to lightning up the dried earth
the unused remains of our forebearers. By God!
We have done it! By god how we have done
it and ourselves. It stares us into a pulver. We
must escape. We must escape. Its gaze is humid.
Please! Release us! It was not us but those before
who stirred you into this rage. You and your
gruesome mud. We shall call you Golem. Please!
Return to the place we should have left you. Golem!
There in the thin crevice between grounds. In
future you can jump and banish us to our unlearning.
Leave us to walk, no human shadow but a drudged
spot mistaken, not a soul but an ego that would not
leave you in the ground.

Elisha Aaron

Elisha Meir Aaron is a young American poet with few publications; in 2018 he was awarded the Mona Elaine Adilman Poetry Prize of McGill University (Montreal, QC, CA) and will be published in the Summer 2020 issue of The Banyan Review. Currently based in Cincinnati, Ohio, he works as an editor for a human rights nonprofit. If you would like to get to know him better, he suggests that you share with him a delicious pourover coffee and candied walnuts.

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