Aaron Gedaliah freely admits there might be times he’s walking around his neighborhood, the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, looking like the kind of guy you might quietly keep an eye on—older and wandering, staring up at the sky or at other people just a little too long.
Not to worry, he says. It’s just a poet at work.
“Writing now for me is just people seeing an old man going out in the park, staring at clouds, and feeling, Oh, shit, maybe he’s on drugs or something, and thinking they should call for help,” Gedaliah says with a laugh. “I’ve written several poems [from] just serendipitously coming across children or pets or just looking at the sky or trees. It’s what a poet or any artist does: look.”
For most of his adult life, Gedaliah has had his gaze trained elsewhere, building a health care career inside hospital walls as a respiratory therapist, medical writer, and researcher. But after retiring, the life he’d constructed gave way to poems begun decades earlier. In The False God’s Lullaby, which Kirkus Reviews calls “an introspective poetry collection that explores and captures experiences from the mundane to the extraordinary,” Gedaliah has created a deeply personal collection of poems of all shapes and sizes.
For Gedaliah, who calls himself a free-form poet, “being seen” is why he bares his soul in poetry. “That’s what all of this is,” he says. Born and raised in Syracuse, New York, Gedaliah took a winding path to becoming a poet. “I was a teenager not knowing what to do,” he says. “I was a drummer and a percussionist, so I tried my hand at that.”
After high school, Gedaliah spent a little time at the University of Miami and then in Boston, where he tried to make it as a rock ’n’ roll drummer. “That was just a total freaking failure,” he says. And that’s when his sister, a nurse, suggested he train to be a respiratory therapist. “She said, ‘You know, it’s two years, and then you’ll be able to support yourself. You can still be a musician, and you won’t need to live with Mom and Dad,’” Gedaliah says. “I only needed to hear that, and I was sold.”
During his second year of school, he read a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine about research at San Francisco General Hospital. “I’ve always loved San Francisco, so I decided I wanted to move out here and work” at the hospital, Gedaliah says. And so he did—for almost forty years.
Gedaliah had always written—essays in grade school and high school, medical science writing during his career, dabbling in poetry along the way—but it wasn’t until he retired that he decided to hone his poetry skills.
“I started writing poetry actually as part of psychotherapy,” he says. “It really happened after I did some gestalt work at the Esalen Institute down in Big Sur, California, on the coast. I had experiences there that were rather incredible, very scary but profound.”
Gedaliah writes about his experiences in several poems in The False God’s Lullaby, including “Esalen: The Raving”:
I cry out and no one
seems to hear.
No one to pull me back,
from the terror flowing liquid,
through my contorted body.
This trembling child’s eyes
grow wider still,
amid the raving night.
When a billion cold stars
fade to pitch, and
the maw of Nothingness
before me, threatens
to cannibalize gravity itself.
I fear the howling of an
alien creature that has
now become my voice.
One of Gedaliah’s therapists pushed him to the edge. “I basically felt like I was in a psychotic state, but I actually was just falling into the void,” Gedaliah says. “He let me fall into it and then pulled me out before I lost it entirely. He was just incredible, an artist’s psychotherapist. I was kind of dabbling in poetry anyway, but he’s the one who really encouraged me to follow it.”
Gedaliah remembers well the day, six years in the making, when, at a personal crossroads, he decided to devote himself to his poetry even more.
It began in 2017 with the death of his father, followed in all-too-quick succession by his retirement from a career he loved in 2018, a cancer diagnosis and surgery in 2019, the pandemic, a recurrence of the cancer in 2022, and, in 2023, establishing a will and living trust, which shook him.
And then came Memorial Day 2023. “I was brimming over with angst,” Gedaliah says. “But at some point that afternoon, the angst faded, and I felt compelled to start writing poems. The first three in rapid succession were ‘Memory,’ ‘Confluence,’ and ‘Longing.’” (All are in The False God’s Lullaby.) That experience inspired Gedaliah to publish a collection, and he went to work, pulling out poetry he’d written since 1990 to determine what could be salvaged and writing new poems to have enough material for a book.
Going through his old poetry brought out the good, the bad, and the ugly of Gedaliah’s writing, according to the poet. “It was very apparent in the process that there were some poems that were ‘This is good as is,’ some I could rework and make something out of them, and some I couldn’t,” he says.
Though the older poetry brought back memories, Gedaliah is quick to point out the difference between reliving, which he didn’t do, and recalling, which he did. “It wasn’t a flashback in a visceral way,” he says. “I remembered the feelings that brought them on, but I didn’t relive that feeling.”
In The False God’s Lullaby, Gedaliah writes about his childhood as both a place of refuge and a source of pain, an exploration that he says he’d already confronted head-on in therapy. “I basically had released all of the pain in therapy, so it wasn’t difficult at all, going through [the poems] again,” he says. Something he learned early on, Gedaliah says, is that the more personal you allow yourself to be, the more universal the appeal of your poetry, and The False God’s Lullaby is deeply personal, tackling loneliness, aging, longing, and meaning, among other topics.
“I find that in reading other people’s poetry, particularly someone like Sylvia Plath, the more honest [you are] about your experience, the more easily you’ll connect with other people,” he says. “I get that, and that’s what I go by.”
The title poem, “The False God’s Lullaby,” began as a prose piece Gedaliah wrote just after he retired in 2018. He included that and a few other pieces in a brief prose section, as well.
Though he’s studied a bit with the writer Sabina Khan-Ibarra, he’s a largely self-taught poet, influenced by the likes of Rainer Maria Rilke, Wendell Berry, Antonio Machado, Denise Levertov, Lauren Isley, and Sylvia Plath. In fact, Gedaliah is working on a series of poems about Plath. “I’m a little bit leery [about] it, because I’m writing poems about one of the greatest poets and…her suicide, about her torment,” he says.
Since The False God’s Lullaby, Gedaliah has written two other books of poetry, What We Hold No Longer and Secondary Worlds, and he’s working on a fourth. He hopes for more to come. “I’ve written about 30 poems for the book, and my goal is to have 60 and then choose about 45 to publish,” he says. “If I can keep this up, I’ll try to put out a collection of poetry every autumn.”
Alec Harvey, a past president of the Society for Features Journalism, is a freelance writer based in Alabama.
