There is a world

When the gramophone makes music in a room

Lifted in green leaves.

Voices of the opera that Mozart wrote

Sing in the morning,

Chaste and passionate.

Samuel Menashe, whose New and Selected Poems was published in 2005 by the Library of America, first published a poem in Commonweal in 1956. A dozen more of his poems appeared in our pages over the decades. He sent us “Voices” a couple of months before his death in late August at the age of eighty-five. Requiescat in pace.