“Music informs much in these compositions,” writes Joseph L. Fleischman of New Haven in the forward to The Village of S’fat, a collection of poetry that he began writing in 1978, “as music and sound, with their components of melody, harmony, rhythm, and tone have the power to captivate the essence of beauty and to capture movement and urgency in a direct and immediate way. The book is available for purchase at amazon.com.

The Flight of the Soul

A bird with a broken wing won’t fly

Can’t soar or dip or take off as he’d like

To escape a situation

That could be troubling and cause bird consternation.

Can’t perch on a birch, he hops along skipping and hopping

Humbly accepting his poor plight,

Bird without flight.

What if flight to the sparrow or wren
If not three quarters or more of his happy being

To be here at once then

There on some fence

Or on top of a tree.

Oh, how free and what skill

And the pure exercise of will.

So a man in his kind

Or a man’s soul or how some imagine it to be.

Though total loss can’t occur to this base of the mind

He can hobgle himself, so he reckons

To the point where nothing remains of his soul to inspect

Yet it really does lie patient like

Though the worst in himself might object

Truth be told, as a man grows old

Nohting stops the lfight of the soul

As it circuels its true home,

The Great One indivisible Whole;

Yet things happen to make this flight go awry

Due to the ineluctable connection between who th soul

Is in its relations

And at times what a person tries.

Take time for what it is – a space ontinuum, it has been said

And like any space you can move, turn in it; there is a
Beginning, there is an end,

And the One Who built these walls

Knows of what they are made:

Perfect judgment, pure mercy and borders of boundless grace.

This is certain – you see things differently at fifty than you do at ten,

But whether a small child or a grown up, you are happy for a friend.