j u l i o    p e r a l t a - p a u l i n o

from "Cemetery Love Match"

 

                             For the Kirshenblatt Family and the Jewish Museum New York
 

When Israel came out of Egypt, the house of Jacob, from a people of
strange language

Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of
 the G-d of Jacob








































 When Israel came out of Egypt, the house of Jacob, from a people of
strange language
 

The town didn’t have a name. It was one of those strange things that used to happen. Maybe, it still does.


I simply call it the old country. It was beautiful, but maybe everybody’s place of origin is pretty through the blur of nostalgic memory.


Our people kept to themselves. Some outsiders considered it selfishness, but it wasn’t like that.


It was a border-town and in the years before mine, there had been devastation and war. Some of the elders still recalled the poverty and pain and did not hesitate to remind or rebuke the young when they began to stray into foreign ways.


These were the reasons which made us live strictly among ourselves. None of us wanted or wished to be caught inside the horror of lack, to be infected by the stampede of modern greed, to have our beliefs be clouded by the rain of the unsanctified.

 

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 Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of
 the G-d of Jacob
 

In the end, I decided to keep the contract secret. Cloistered in the way that sacred things should be held. In a state of insularity as those that starve for true knowledge are often hidden from the madness of the world. Concealed save for the attending eyes of Levia under the skies of our adoration.


I said too much, that is one of the lines I used, the skies of our adoration. Still, you know from the song how some of it might read.


So many years have gone by, perhaps it is all right to say as much and to hope that in the remaining years there will still be that shiver and rush which sends us racing back to the excitement of being newly wed.


Yes, among the gravestones. An act which may or may not have ended the swivel fever, but most definitely the pivoting had ceased afterwards.

 

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JULIO PERALTA-PAULINO is a writer currently at work on possibly a list too long to actually complete including some prose that will involve the word basilisk. He will be featured in the tenth and last edition of Jack Magazine and he is more thrilled than can be described through mere words that some of his writing does glitter in the grand literary wonder that is Alice Blue Prose.

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