No not for the reasons of my Old World ancestors
afraid of uttering those almighty syllables
casually or in a curse
Scared of
accidentally tossing out the most sacred letters
with the chicken bones and potato peels

No I won’t say your name
because those who led the pogroms against my blood
displayed your enameled face

Because priests invoked you
against lovers who honored their desires
while pushing altar boys under their cassocks

Because so many Josephs and Marys
dragged long bags of cotton down row after row
hungering for one good meal
with Jesus in the afterlife
Because the Inquisitors showed Galileo Galilei
the iron instruments
that could make him look away
from the ellipses of the earth
and yet he muttered E pur si muove
Because motorcycle assassins machete secular bloggers
and even their own beautiful Sufis
who tell stories of Rumi’s teacher Shams-i-Tabrizi
selling girdles from town to town
while he saw the divine in a cat licking her kitten

Because my mother’s atheist ashes would shatter their urn

No I can’t say your name
though I covet the serenity of those who do

# # #

Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of twenty books or plays. His eighth book of poems, Talking with the Radio: poems inspired by jazz and popular music, was published in 2015 by Kattywompus Press. He is also writing a series of plays about authors, incorporating their writing into the action. The most recent of these, Colette Uncensored, had its first staged reading at the Millennium Stage of the Kennedy Center in Washington DC in 2015 and had a five-month run at The Marsh in San Francisco and Berkeley in 2016. His blog, Advice for Writers, has 190 posts on topics of interest to writers. Currently he teaches in the low-residency MFA in writing program at the University of Alaska Anchorage and serves as a contributing editor of Catamaran Literary Reader. www.zackrogow.com

Photo credit: Dirk Dreyer www.dreyerpictures.com