Poem: 55th High School Reunion

Smoked fish, an omelet station. It was a bar mitzvah

but only the grandparents were invited

and the child may just have died. 

We wore on our backs our graduation pictures

for pats or slaps, for easy recognition.

Programs and bags were shoved aside

in the rush to claim seats. The hum above speech

was the one-man band switching hands, saxophone to banjo.

Here we were so near the end assembled again,

having first been asked to fill out

for a new yearbook our applications to heaven.

Elaine Terranova’s sixth book of poems, “Dollhouse,” won the 2012 Off the Grid Press poetry book award. She is a recipient of the Walt Whitman Award and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience.