Jetlagged at 3:30 am

In the middle of the night As the stars still twinkle bright As coyotes reunite Their howling causing fright I’m getting more and more uptight Because the sun is out of sight But my mind’s neurons are alight Connecting explosively like dynamite Thumbs on iPhone furiously type Like that Hamilton playwright But there’s no inspiration nor insight Nothing rises to brilliance to copyright I’m just pissed (that’s impolite) That I’m lying awake way past midnight There’s no nighttime ladder (like Torah’s Jacobite) Just fleeing sleep (how do I extradite?) I’m so tired, is that alright?! ‘Cause I’m a transplanted Canaanite On the night after my international flight Where I enjoyed my Jewish birthright... I’m awake. Thinking about our trip to the Holy Land With 41 others, now a band Whose love of Zion has been fanned Who have been harmonized to understand With ideas once contraband That nuance and complexity they now demand Knowing each issue has an ampersand Going beyond the cable newsstand Beyond sloganeering which they now withstand History, religion, politics, that we too often misunderstand As we love our beautiful Jewish homeland Which is also Palestine, their motherland Oy such thinking, once contraband Opened up worlds to contemplate, that was unplanned, Amidst the memories so grande: Of Jerusalem’s gold we saw firsthand Tel Aviv-Jaffa our eyes had scanned Shabbat at the Jordan River, our Rio Grande Celebrating that Arab/Jewish-women’s-olive-growing-collaborative, give them a hand Listening to peace-loving Palestinian and Jewish young firebrands And buying special-needs-grown Tulip wines, cash in hand, Emoting at Ben Gurion’s grave in the Negev fatherland Contemplating life after Yad Vashem’s collection of Nazi armbands Amazed by Eilat and Petra and our sun-induced skin tanned And Kibbutz Lotan’s eco-building with mud, straw and sand We ate too much, again unplanned Delicious beef (chateaubriand?) Fresh veggies from the central Galilean farmland And too much falafel/shawarma/humus In amounts we really should withstand As they did damage to our digestive gland While talking about our Israeli niece’s soon-to-be-worn wedding band And the other niece’s brilliant biological-computer science slight of hand, And Lana’s brilliant guiding, a concert grand Oy, Da’at Travel, too many memories, I must reprimand... I gotta go back to sleep. Well, it’s time to say goodbye To the jetlag I must defy No tossing, turning, or deep sigh I’m back in to bed to rectify This lack of nighttime sleepy eye From a trip to Israel, a splendid spiritual high, A “foreign country” now demystified A complex place once oversimplified A love burrowed into my heart which makes me cry Remembering our closing circle, not one dry eye, As we went to say goodbye To each other and the Holy Land, while wondering why All we hear about are the war cries And not the majority of peace seekers (where’s our Versailles?) We need a Moses on Mt. Sinai Or a peace-preaching reform rabbi To show us the way forward, and identify The shared love that really underlies That sacred place, that preoccupies Our far off hearts, our inner third eye “Next year in Jerusalem” we all proscribe But my tearing up exhausted eye Tells me, nigh... I’m still awake. Oy, the sunlight’s peaking in I’m still writing, that’s my sin This jetlag is really gonna win (Cue the maudalin violin) As I think about Israel, my conjoined twin And the love that has always been A centering place right here within Claiming my heart, soul, and very skin So, after two weeks in Zion, jetlag’s akin To taking it once more on the chin For that trip to settle in Where milk and honey still flows in So I give up, I cannot win It’s biological, ain’t no sin It’s a new day, hey, let’s begin... Dammit, I’m awake!