The Golem

Artwork by Shruthi Medicherla, Art Team Director and staff artist.

My heart, they carved with ash of the hearth;

My limbs, molded from clay and stone.

My eyes, they filled with dust and dirt;

A body remnant of their home.

But my soul, neshama, they shaped with words,

Breathed unto my lips the holiest prayer;

Upon my brow emet they swore

would make me humble, loyal, fair.  

I took their commands in servitude,

Devouring their words like a starving man.

In pen and page I found my food;

For ink, I took the blood on my hands. 

But they forgot my heart of dust

Beat same as theirs under my skin,

And for all they spoke of truth and trust

They never saw me as their kin.

Hearts of stone never break,

But souls can shatter all the same.

They watched their slave become their mistake:

I struck a match on my wrist and set their home aflame.

One letter, and truth turned to death;

Their silence burned them to the ground.

What holy words gifted my lips breath

Were scattered in the ashes, not to be found.

A piece of folklore I have become,

but better than to slave away;

still, let the moral of my story be this:  

Words make the difference

between man and clay.

~

For as long as I can remember I have been listening to my mother’s stories. This one in particular, the story of the golem, she would only tell us when we were sitting by the dying embers of the fireplace, because the golem was made by ashes from the hearth. There are many variations of him in Jewish folklore, and similar beings in other cultures as well, but while the materials he was made from—clay, ash, mud—differ from tale to tale, the thing that brings him to life is always the same: the golem will remain a lifeless clump until someone inscribes the Hebrew word emet, written אמת, which means truth, on his forehead or chest. According to my mother, whoever wrote the word—often a rabbi or a beadle—would have complete control over the golem, who could not speak or refuse his master. However, golems were unpredictable, and oftentimes they would turn against their master’s wishes and become dangerous. In order to reduce a golem back to his lifeless form, one must scratch out or erase the first letter, so the word changes to met (מת), which means death. 

In this poem, I drew upon the fireplace stories of my mother and my own feelings of wanting to escape an unhealthy relationship with writing and words. Writing and poetry is often heavily romanticized, when in reality, it is a hugely versatile experience that can easily become toxic or negative. I’ve personally felt many times that writing dehumanizes me, and that words can be as addictive as any drug—as seen in the line where the golem runs out of ink and uses their own blood to make letters.

Avah Dodson’s short fiction and poetry have won prizes and recognition in the Bluefire 1,000 Words Contest, the Royal Nonesuch Humor Contest, the Scholastic Writing Awards contest (National Gold Medalist), the Sarah Mook Poetry Contest, the Kay Snow Poetry & Fiction Contests, and the Betty Award Contest, among others. Her works have appeared in The Incandescent Review, Echo Lit, Parallax, Voices de la Luna, Stone Soup Magazine, Highlights Magazine, Skipping Stones Magazine, DePaul’s Blue Book: Best American High School Writing, and others. She enjoys reading, going on walks with her cats, and k-pop (a little too much). She despises grapes with seeds and ukuleles. You can find her holed up in her room listening to Stray Kids or spending time with her family and friends.