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poetry by Lois Roisman
A Modicum of Grace (For Grace Paley)
Winner of this year’s Charlotte Newberger Poetry Prize
If we’d sat at her father’s seder
and heard his charge to stretch to the stranger,
or inhaled the fragrant conversation
at their Shabbos table—a verbal challah
braided from strands of Yiddish and Russian
and Bronx stooptalk—old distant
voices raging in yet another strangers’ world,
shouting witness to the world that ought to be—