Shabbat Poem by Justin Aptaker

nothing is ever lost, but dust blankets cover
the sheets are swept back every week
every seven days
somewhere in Its approaching aftermath

do not write Words that can not be written
They are written in the glass
dim, stained multi-colored
obscured by the turn of a child's kaleidoscope
obscured by the lower fog
which condenses around the heads of men

Their Beauty is not like our beauty, born from transience—they are not temporal
Their beauty shows from our transience
from the shift that sublimates,
with Grace
extending survival to all creatures with ears
and to the daughters of men

all of my life, i have been born of women
in every womb, again and again
but know that when night has resolved this labor
I am born in rest, without motion or passage

and a woman will have become
a memory forgotten by the forgetting of man
when begetting is un-begotten
when They will be joined truly
to restore what a man separated
using

the most basic mathematics