The Saturday poem: The Electrification of Beth Shalom

by Ruth Padel

I am looking too hard, or this scene is looking too hard

at me. Turn of the century and the last Chief Rabbi of Crete

is standing by seven naked bulbs, the first electric light

in town. What of the chandelier, a shiver of gold

chrysanthemums or, if you prefer, the roof?

He has decades to go, this Rabbi. They'll bury him in 1933.

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