THE POETRY OF ALYSSA LAPPEN

My dear friend and e-pal  Alyssa A. Lappen is pleased to announce the April 21 launch of her first full-length poetry book, The Minstrel’s Song (Cross-Cultural Communications, 2015), at 6:15 p.m. at the Brooklyn Heights Library. The event is sponsored in honor of National Poetry Month by the Friends of the Brooklyn Heights Library. Cross-Cultural Communications Editor and Publisher Stanley H. Barkan will also be present.Ms. Lappen’s poetry has been widely published; she won the 2000 annual chapbook award from Ruah: A Journal of Spiritual Poetry, and received a Harvard Summer Poetry Prize. She is also an investigative journalist focusing on the Middle East and Islam.

The Minstrel’s Song, a 96-page volume, features seven sections of verse, as well as seven original art works by Israeli artist Helen Bar-Lev.

THE PLAN

Into the arid space between earth and sky,
the cracks in the human soul seep. They fill

with hail of stones from the Temple Mount,
the Waqf’s iron door slammed, barring Jews

who wish to pray in a small circle of ten,
their blue-fringed shawls worth lives

of 69 martyrs—if only the shawls stay
folded, unused, and grow drenched

with suicides’ blood. Stones play well
in the press. So come, puppet children

and hurl them. My poor little slaves
of hate, make of my Iago a saint.

October 6, 2000

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Note: The Waqf is a body of Muslim clerics, to which Israel gave control of the Temple Mount in 1967 out of respect for Muslim belief—although it is Judaism’s holiest site, where the second temple stood until its destruction in 70 C.E. The Waqf has long denied access to any minyan—the minimum of ten men required by Jewish law to offer prayers.

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