This poem is one which bursts at the seams with a sense of Jewish tradition and culture, forming unto itself a sacred space through this connection. Jessica Greenbaum’s poem “A Poem for S” uses religious themes, imagery, an abecedarian structure, and careful word choice to create a poem which meditates on the often-forgotten sanctity of language, words, and the very letters therein. She masterfully made me consider the sanctity of each word of the poem, as if lifting the veil of the tabernacle; a new linguistic context is given to us in which we, too, may share her sacred tradition, and find the prayer in everyday speech. On the page, the poem is square, rigid like the scrolling text of a prayer book, and reading through the text, one realizes …show more content…
It is as if to say that a new temple has been built in place of the one destroyed nearly 2000 years ago, as God, through the prayer found everywhere, comforts. So it is that the poem itself mimics this, having an abecedarian structure starting with “A,” and ending with “Zarfs,” (Greenbaum) A to Z. It is said that good poetry imitates its subject, and this makes “A Poem for S” an excellent example of this principle. The poem, through this structure, is able to exemplify and strengthen its point on the sanctity of the alphabet, as it quite literally makes a prayer out of it, line by line. Interestingly, however, there is not a line for every letter, with only 25 lines including the title, meaning one letter is missing: the letter Y. An interesting choice when one considers the specific sanctity of this letter in Judaism, given that its Hebrew equivalent, Yod, is the first letter of the tetragrammaton, the most powerful word in Judaism, said to make the earth shake and mountains smoke by its