Please — one more day
Image by iStock
Image by iStock
This moving poem, by Miri Konigsberg, commemorates the death of the parent of a family’s foster child due to Covid-19. Such a loss is complicated and devastating at any time, but during the pandemic, death has taken on whole new complexities. The poem speaks of everyday pleasures and even everyday annoyances, all now cast in a different light in the shadow of death.
Give me one more day
Please just one.
To listen to the rain against the windows
The wind through the trees,
The bawling and the brawling,
The rhythm of a world that breathes.
One more day
To empty loaded garbage cans,
To pick up one stray sock,
To serve up one more pot of pasta,
To take another walk
To sweep up the trail of crumbs,
To trip over their shoes,
To listen to their worries
Offer a hug, a smile, a sigh
And share corona blues
One more day
To hear the giggling children,
Who then finally fall asleep,
To watch their chests rise and fall,
And kiss their downy cheeks.
One more day
To feel Your caress,
To thank You for another day,
To pray for mercy and strength,
To feel the sting of hidden tears,
And the yearning, oh, for faith.
Just one more day. Please
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
