Oh, let your dead revive!
Let corpses arise!
Awake and shout for joy,
You who dwell in the dust!
Isaiah 26:19

I awake in darkness, six feet down,
bleary from denied eternal rest.
My body rebuilds from the base of my spine
outward: vertebrae stacking, limbs sprouting,
organ and muscle and sinew and skin,
until I am whole, wrenched back to life.

Had I paid attention, had I believed
in what I’d been taught, this would not
be such a shock. I ought to have known
my blessed death would end like this:

Jerusalem calling—demanding—
fingers on puppet strings pulling me in
forcing my return to where I’ve never been.

*

Cremation was forbidden. I learned
this young, before death was real, before
I feared it, then welcomed and loved it.
My Hebrew school teacher, small and frail,
arm marked with numbers, described widows
in Europe scraping bits of bone and
tissue off cobblestone streets: pieces
of a body, a life, placed entire
in the casket, an unsolved puzzle.
My nightmares for months: red-darkened dirt,
wailing women, nails filthy with death.

The same teacher, in a cheerier tone,
said the Messiah would gather us from
our graves, lead us to olam ha-ba:
the world to come, our birthright, our home.

I, barely more than a babe, did not ask
what one thing had to do with the other.
The “Jerusalem” we sang was a metaphor,
an idea of home; not actual houses
and highways and shops and hospitals.
Not a place already populated.

I thought the “arising,” the gathering
up was a metaphor too. So much
I was not told. So much I did not
know, even in death, in the cradle
of earth, where I hoped to rest forever.

*

I’m no longer that girl who trusted
her teachers. I did not ask for resurrection;
I have no use for olam ha-bah.
I am a corpse who pines for pine, and
this world to come is no world of mine.

So I will return to ground, burrow
in search of silence, refuse to move.
I will plant myself like a flower,
scatter seeds to the wind—I will cede.

And if you too resist the callous
call, whatever parts or your body
you lay to rest beneath my petals
are welcome. Our jumbled bones, our warm
blood will nourish the dust where we dwell.
Our spines entwined, our empty eyes and
gaping grins a welcoming to the
world we made, the death we chose. And we
will say, at last and at rest, Amen.