Baruch November is the author of Bar Mitzvah Dreams and Dry Nectars of Plenty, which was co-winner of the BigCityLit chapbook contest. His poem “After Esav” was nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize.
He co-directs and organizes the Jewish Community Center of Buffalo’s Poetry Series. For more than 15 years, he has taught courses in Shakespeare, poetry, and writing at Touro University in Manhattan, NY.
“I wanted a way to remember my trip to Morocco,” Baruch says, “which was very fulfilling because of my great tour guide, Yahya, who took me all over Casablanca, also known as the White City. Luckily, much of this poem came to me naturally. The end of the poem was the only part that came to me long after the trip.”
Burned Red in The White City
My skin turned deep
red, a painful memento
of Casablanca, where I passed
through the markets of its old city and bought
just squeezed orange juice
from a stoic Senegalese woman,
a sapphire-colored bottle
of perfume for my mother,
traditional Moroccan
teacups with no handles
for my father.
My tour guide was dedicated to telling
me everything about Morocco,
but I failed him,
only taking in a few things
since the heat
was throbbing that day and all
I could think about was my next
bottle of water.
The White City was something
to behold yet where
the French had lived,
once beautiful, pale buildings
were decomposing
into the hungry
nothing from
which they came.