Poem: Again, These Blintzes

Months ago you rolled the thin pancakes around
the cottage cheese and froze them for this December
morning, as the sun glistens the ice crusted branches
and snow weighs down the spruce needles. Now,
you heat them on the cook stove and I wake, the way
my grandfather woke, to the smell of dough frying in butter.
We smother them with sauce from strawberries
we picked and sliced and mashed with sugar and stored
last summer or was it the summer before last? I’m confused:
how time slips — sour cream sticks in the hairs of my beard.
Or is it my grandfather’s tongue that savors each crumb?
Slender hours rolled like crepe around our preserved souls,
sweet fruit of recurrence, these Ukrainian delicacies —
each taste swallows me back to him, that peasant rabbi.

Philip Terman is the author of “Our Portion: New and Selected Poems” (Autumn House Press, 2015); “The House of Sages” (Mammoth books, 1998 and 2004); “Book of the Unbroken Days” (Mammoth books, 2005); “Rabbis of the Air” (Autumn House Press, 2007) and “The Torah Garden” (Autumn House Press, 2011).