by Annie Diamond (’20)
Kaddish —————mouth-different
—-from other————- supplications:
looser ——-quieter ——pitched lower
——Some versions of tradition —dictate
mourners alone rise ————to deliver it
and some allow——— that all recite Kaddish
–for those who ———had no one to recite
for them ——–The Kaddish never
——-mentions death: it rather praises
God ——————-line after line
This is clever writing: ———-I admire it.
Author Commentary: “To cite again” highlights the linguistic elements of prayer, particularly Jewish prayer. I am about as secular a Jew as it gets, but for a long time I loved to recite Hebrew prayers at Shabbat and other Jewish services. The title “To cite again” is a literal interpretation of the word “recite;” reciting is a term I associate strongly with Hebrew prayers, the Torah, and Shabbat services. I have always loved reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish for its sounds; the traditional recitation of the prayer has a very different music than that of any other commonly recited Jewish prayer. As the poem mentions, some versions of Jewish tradition indicate that only those in mourning should recite the prayer, but other versions call for everyone present to recite it, partly as an aspect of community and partly to honor victims of the Shoah, who had no one to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish for them, as well as victims of other ethnic cleansings throughout history (this is perhaps a generous interpretation of the prayer, but I think everyone could stand to be a little more generous nowadays, particularly in our acknowledgment of the humanity of others).
Annie Diamond (’20) is a poet, Joycean, and breakfast enthusiast living and working in Chicago. She graduated from MAPH in 2020, where she focused on English and poetics and wrote a thesis on James Joyce and Jamaica Kincaid, advised by Maud Ellmann. Before coming to MAPH, she earned an MFA in poetry at Boston University in 2017 and a BA in English at Barnard College in 2015. She has also been awarded fellowships by MacDowell, Luminarts Cultural Foundation, and The Lighthouse Works. Her poems appear and are forthcoming in Western Humanities Review, No Tokens, Modern Language Studies, and elsewhere. She is currently trying to publish her first book of poetry.