The Importance of a Single Word

How can I tell you this? How can I not?
There is a word that fills my mouth,
that makes me smile and understand the world
for maybe the first time ever.
Traghairm.
It means to prophesy
while wrapped in a bullock's skin
behind a waterfall,
an entire story, a culture, a magic, a happening
in a single word
How can I tell you this? How can I not?
See him, this seer, naked except for that skin,
shivering in the spray, praying, throwing the bones,
picking through entrails, entranced,
hair slicked down with dreams.
When he emerges, what will he tell us?
That the world is ending, beginning,
concentrating, flying apart?
That there will be bank failures,
suicides,  brown grass, ozone ruptures?
That the great blue glaciers and the great blue whales,
equal survivors of ages, are doomed?
That owls and frogs and white tigers and salamanders
best be caught in our lenses before they are gone?
He can see it all, without a tv, without reading the Sunday Times,
without consulting the Farmer's Almanac
or his neighbor's copy of Edgar Cayce or the Book of the Dead.
All he needs is a bullock's skin and a waterfall.
All he needs is a word,
Like inauguration.

"Ich Bin A Yood"

After reading a Holocaust anecdote in
Barbara Rush's Book of Jewish Women's Tales
The rabbi's daughter,
savaged by a thousand cuts,
a thousand bites
from Grayze's dogs,
called out for each cut, each bite
that she was a Jew and would not kneel.
She died, on her knees,
but not kneeling
for she stood upright at the throne of God.
God, I wish I had such courage
to not-kneel in the face
of outrage, the teeth of tyranny,
the knives of the unholy.
Instead I change the channels,
I turn the page,
I write a small poem
in the rabbi's daughter's honor,
I, who do not even know her name.