HOCKING

I learned from Moe, although I do come from a background of hocking

Moe Foner, Flo Ziegfield of Labor, subject of multiple poems,

liked both the word and the act of Hocking, Yiddish

with chop at its root, and with the familiar phrase so many

of us knowfrom our hocking childhoods: hak mir nisht keyn

tshaynik which translates in an inelegant way:

Stop Bugging Me (or don’t keep banging on the teapot) and I

who have the incessant gene (perhaps it is actually a hocking gene)

sent an email again to a friend today who I have written to SEVEN TIMES

asking her for SOMETHING SMALL only a letter I want her to write

saying She Likes My Book to a woman she knows in publishing

I know I should just give it up

it doesn’t matter but I in the spirit of Moe Foner recognize

the counterintuitive wisdom in one of his thousands

of notions (with the potential to be collected in a small volume:

Sayings from Chairman Moe): You Can Never Hock Too Much.