Robert Hirschfield

Robert Hirschfield is a New York-based poet whose poems appear in many countries (US, Japan, Germany, UK, Ireland and Canada.) A very short Alzheimer's poem about his mother, Her Alzheimer's is the subject of most of his poetry, which appears in Salamander, Noon (Japan), Vallum (Canada), Cholla Needlles (US), The Moth (Ireland), The Wild Word (Germany) and other publications.

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► Robert Hirschfield's microchap is available below. Download the single-page PDF by clicking the title & saving to your pc. Set your printer for 'landscape' printing. Folding instructions are under the Who We Are menu tab.

Origami Microchap

About My Mother

Click title to download PDF microchap

Robert Hirschfield CVR About My Mother 2021

Cover by Lauri Burke

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After Love

for Julia

After love
nothing moves
but time
backwards

a face
its green dart
of snow

your seventy-seven
years
blink

Covid/Late Love

for Julia

Red face mask
over gapped denture,
who scripted this?

White hair blowing straight out,
I bend, find
your lips in purdah.

In Wright’s Oak Park,
we are a monastery
of brazen ripeness
among the cloistered dead.

How young we are, we marvel.
In and out of each other,
we contemplate the abyss.

What She Still Remembers

A skullcap
torn from a boy’s head
is flung all the way
across Poland.

Cheating At Cards

She slaps down
her three shadows
on the table
and runs off
with my shadow.

Termite

In her empty shopping bag,

she is a second emptiness.

I crouch beneath her,

feeling myself sacred

as the termite must.

Beneath

Beneath flakes of cottage cheese,
her Book of Psalms
Beneath her Book of Psalms,
her caved head.
Beneath her caved head,
my detached hand
wearing her glasses.
She is dead, she tells me.
It’s the happiest she’s sounded
in weeks.

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Poets