The Day He Called Me Kike

I searched for the origin of the word.
If this is who I am, I want to know my name,
And what it means
To taste, to hear, to see, to be.

When my unnamed being arrived,
Hope trailing in the wind,
We were announced by “O”’s -
Not the instructed “X”’s
In the image of ankles tied together,
Wrists nailed apart,
In the image of a prayer not our own.
O:
Circle, Kikel, Kikey, Kike.
And so I was named.

With a single spoken word,
I became a circle scrawled a century ago
On a world of promises
Broken by a single spoken word.
If I am
A ring, a curving flourish,
The signature in the corner of an eternal painting,
I am proud to have never marked
Slashes over my world.

COURTESY OF THE YU POETRY CLUB