My daughter teaches us to recite a poem

in Chinese—a poem all schoolchildren learn,

Li Bai: bright moonlight, frost, missing home.

It’s for the teacher who taught her the poem;

we practice in the taxi to the station.

Everyone in China can recite this poem.

Our driver, stunned, joins in, has us mimic him; 

slowly, he exaggerates each tone:
Bright moonlight, frost on the ground, missing home.

He laughs and laughs, amused by our game

while I’m trying (impossible) to imagine

all my countrymen united by a poem

though, once, a cab driver recited Omar Khayyam

all the way from the Salt Lake Airport in Persian

when I told him what I do (he missed home)

and my father-in-law could reel off every psalm

in Hebrew (a brief shtetl education):

The sun will not smite . . .or the moon. . . .Help will  come . . . . 

How can we sing God’s song away from home?