Michael Salcman

(KADDISH) AT THE KEYBOARD

I’ve not erased the dead from my birthday alarm:

My tickler celebrates birth over death

The app on my computer nudging memory against

A future filled with the loss of friends.

In digital tombstones made of zeros and ones

Endings are ignored in favor of life’s start—

Each em dash trailed by a void.

Parents recompose in my electrons, so do some poets.

Seeing their faces and hearing their voices in my head

Is one more test of meaningful existence,

All of us going on living until those remembering

Join in the army of the dead

When I suppose in a new tomorrow

Only robots will be left this side of the screen.

MICHAEL SALCMAN: poet, retired physician and art historian, was born in Pilsen Czechoslovakia. He trained in brain surgery at Columbia’s Neurological Institute. He is the author of 200 scientific articles and six medical books. He served as chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. He lectures widely about art and the brain. Among many other journals his poems appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Arts & Letters, The Café Review, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, Notre Dame Review, Ontario Review, Panygyrus, Poet Lore, Raritan and Solstice. Featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily and All Things Considered, his work has received six nominations for a Pushcart Prize... Full Profile