Deli…a poem by Sherman Pearl
One of you great readers let me know about a great poem about saving a deli, which was published in the magazine Jewish Currents this summer. It was written by LA poet Sherman Pearl, and it’s titled DELI.
DELI
Sherman Pearl
Open your doors to us, Zucky; tear the plywood
from your plate glass windows, take down the For Sale sign,
sweep the dust of your failure from the entranceway.
Let us spend this Sabbath at the booth where the seats
are dented to fit us, where cracks in the Formica
spell out our names and the menus carry our fingerprints.
Make us wait too long; send a waitress with dyed
disheveled hair and an apron stained with mustard; have her
lean over us tapping a pencil while we contemplate
your bounty, the infinite combinations, while we breathe
the pickle-tart air. Have her push the specials —
dishes stuffed with kasha, spiced with remembrance
and later, when we start gesturing for our orders, call out
from the back in an accent exiled from the Old Country
It’s coming already! And while we’re eating
stroll over wiping your hands, smiling down on us.
We’re hungry, Zucky.
Are you busy in that darkness; can you hear us knocking?
The poem is an ode to the defunct Zucky’s Deli, in Santa Monica, a delicatessen that has been closed since 1993, but remains standing, though vacant. Soon, it will be renovated and turned into something else. Zucky’s had been an institution for years in the area, and was frequented by Arnold Schwarzenegger each morning for breakfast on the way home from the gym. You can read a little more about it here. Preserve LA has been attempting to save the location, though to little avail.
So what we have is Mr. Pearl’s lovely poem, which could really stand in for any great deli that we loved and watched die. Enough to bring tears to my eyes.
If you have similar poems, songs, or haikus about delis, please do send them in or post them in the comments.
