Michael Stone's contribution to our Call for Poems on the topic of epidemics, illness, medicine, death and healing

Michael E. Stone, an emeritus professor of Armenology in Jerusalem, Israel, has shared this original work. APP thanks him.

Cedared Memory

Do ancient dryads
still live, that knew
the cedars of Lebanon
three millennia gone?

In Solomon’s kingdom
Hiram’s craftsmen helped
fashion the great beams
for his House of Cedar.

My mother had a cedar chest,
wooden, red, deep polished,
its top swung on brass hinges.

She kept the woolen blankets
folded deep in it, for cedar
stops mold, kills moths.

“it’s worth cedaring.”
they would declare,
of a poet’s pleasing work,
in ancient Rome.

ephemeral beside
ancient cedars,
our memories,
live on and on,

enshrined in flesh,
on stone and on clay,
on leather and paper,
in minds and in souls,

carry us back to before
that small seedling cedar
peeped through the topsoil.

”And you shall tell your child,”
the ancient words demand.
Be links in the chain,
write, remember, retell.