Slap Me Five

To hear James Reiss reading "Slap Me Five," click here.


I believe in the separation of Church & State
as fervently as our Founding Fathers.
But the five Bible verses that each kid read aloud
before our class recited The Lord's Prayer
in home room every day in Hillsdale, New Jersey
let me learn such ravishing Jacobean
English that today I feel like King James
at my keyboard, writing, "Behold,
it is a high-cirrus morning; the sky is white."

No longer a fifth-grader—my hair's getting white—
I'm not about to launch a theocracy
& turn my college classes into Christian
gab fests, much less Jewish megillahs.
But when I jog at dawn I think, "My God,
five miles lie before me like five hundred
lines of poetry I learned before I knew
I would be running with the poets who
give us this day our dose of old New Jersey."

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