Behaving Like A Jew

by Gerald Stern

This is Michael Carey for Voices from the Prairie a weekly sampling from the rich soil of Iowa’s literary tradition. Today’s poem is "Behaving Like a Jew" by Gerald Stern long an warm, popular and enthusiastic instructor recently retired from the University of Iowa. His immense love and compassion is evident in this poem. If he can feel this deeply about a dead rodent on the highway, it is no wonder that every living being he came in touch with in Iowa felt his love and compassion too.

Behaving Like A Jew

When I got there the dead opossum looked like
an enormous baby sleeping on the road.
It took me only a few seconds – just
seeing him there – with the hole in his back
and the wind blowing through his hair
to get back again into my animal sorrow.
I am sick of the country, the bloodstained
bumpers, the stiff hairs sticking out of the grilles,
the slimy highways, the heavy birds
refusing to move;
I am sick of the spirit of Lindbergh over everything,
that joy in death, that philosophical
understanding of carnage, that
concentration on the species.
--- I am going to be unappeased at the opossum’s death.
I am going to behave like a Jew
and touch his face, and stare into his eyes,
and pull him off the road.
I am not going to stand in a wet ditch

with the Toyotas and the Chevies passing over me
at sixty miles an hour
and praise the beauty and the balance
and lose myself in the immortal lifestream
when my hands are still a little shaky
from his stiffness and his bulk
and my eyes are still weak and misty
from his round belly and his curved fingers
and his black whiskers and his little dancing feet.

"Behaving Like A Jew" by Gerald Stern from Leaving Another Kingdom: Selected Poems published by Harper originally published in the book Lucky Life published by Houghton Mifflin.

For Voices From the Prairie and Humanities Iowa, this is Michael Carey hoping you continue to hear the music blooming all around you.

Gerald Stern often lays claim to places and things other people have abandoned. His poems explore past time and heritage, seeking to relocate them in an ecstatic present. In this quest, the poems resemble spiritual acts. They bestow attention upon all living beings and offer consolation for their senseless suffering. His ten books of poetry include the recent volumes, Last Blue (2000), This Time: New and Selected Poems (1998), and Odd Mercy (1995). Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1925, he published his first collection, Rejoicings (1973), when he was forty-six, and his second book, Lucky Life, won the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1976. Gerald Stern has received many honors and awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Academy of American Poets, a Bess Hoskin Award, and a National Book Award for This Time. Having taught for many years at the University of Iowa in Iowa City he has now retired to Lambertville, New Jersey, where he was named New Jersey’s first Poet Laureate.