Steve Zeitlin
Steve Zeitlin is a folklorist, writer, poet, and cultural activist. He received his PhD in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA in literature from Bucknell University. He is the founding director of City Lore, New York’s center for urban folk culture, launched in 1985. He is the director, codirector, or coproducer of a number of documentary films, including Free Show Tonight on traveling medicine shows, and author of ten books on America’s folk culture, including Because God Loves Stories: An Anthology of Jewish Storytelling, The Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awareness, as well as a volume of poetry, I Hear America Singing in the Rain. He has documented, recorded, and fallen in love with carnival pitches, children’s rhymes, family stories, subway stories, ancient cosmologies and oral poetry traditions from around the world.
steve@citylore.org
City Lore Website
Magician
When they sawed Amanda in half
and pulled a rabbit from the hat
the Magician cried
It’s a boy, it’s a beautiful boy!
who five years later asked his Dad,
if it’s a trick
is there no such thing as magic?
Only tricksters, no magicians?
And can it be that life
is all we know of miracles?
Family Vigil
Through the long hours of darkness
Amanda keeps the family vigil,
keeping watch with one eye open
on the sea of night.
And the beds are rocked to sleep on a swaying sea
like cradles
until she rises
in the half sleep of newly born
mothers
wafts across the shadowed room
like an apparition on the waters
cradling her baby like a quarter moon.
dark light
wash away your inhibitions
divulge the naked urge
haunt the dark places
where spirits troll
for inebriated laughter
in the lipstick’s red glow
no one casts a shadow
the light shines from below
The Intergalactic Diamond Cloak
How do you wear the universe?
Does it drape across your shoulders
loose
or snug?
Are you lost in it?
Does it need some alterations?
Can you find some warmth in there?
Is it a shmatte thrown across your shoulder
or are you life-resplendent
in that intergalactic diamond cloak?
Animated Stardust
Sentient being,
Are we on a quest to understand the universe
or are we some aspect of creation’s quest
to understand itself?
Frail and human creatures of the cosmos
can we sense the presence
of our own Creator
in this animated stardust?
This dust that renders visible
A stream of light –
particles dancing in a beam of light!
Oyá Breathes
As you lie dying,
struggling for breath,
know that Oyá., Orisha of Winds,
the One who blows the treetops,
ruffles the mighty seas,
trembles the leaves
breathing in, breathing out—
is with you.
Rattle of death
faltering last breath
Oyá
is with you!
Exhale deeply.
Your dying breath is
the Goddess breathing in
breathing in, breathing in,
exhaling to another world
that only now begins.
~ with Martha Dahlen and Yoruba priest,
Michael Mansfield
Learning to Live with Spirits
Upon my death,
I bequeath to each of you who loved my disappearing soul –
a magician’s cloak – to conjure me in memory.
Proceed with a light touch –
tip your hat, wave the cloak across the table –
like a bouquet of roses my spirit appears
leaving the audience of mourners astonished, hushed.
Invoke our favorite punchlines
with a magician’s sleight of hand.
Levitate a memory till my spirit lingers in the air
(the secret to the trick
is that we loved each other so so much)
Though the swords of death skewer the swordbox
my spirit lies curled around the blades untouched
