Adira

Sometimes a dark cloud comes

To linger.

I reach my hands into the wet, dank, darkness

And I search for the sunshine with my fingertips.

The first ray is a blessing and a curse

Because then

I must go on;

I must continue.

Tefila

Let me find peace

With myself

And the world

And my neighbours

With the past

This pain, future pains;

Allow me acceptance.

After Love

There is a pain so deep

No mouth can name it

It is the loneliness of generations

To be aware of every painful life

Of every cut in humanity

Some still open to the sun.

There is a pain so deep

The kind of pain that can take you with it

The kind of pain that can rename you

Tame you

Know you

And shatter your being into

A thousand painful shards.

The soul knows to avoid that kind of pain

When you don’t see it coming

And it grabs you

It gets larger by the day.

It is the kind of pain that destroys

And nothing can bring you back from that place

Once you have entered hand in hand

You belong to the pain, life gave it to you

A special gift.

My love

You have decided to leave me

At the shore of the

Heart where I have roots.

I have fallen into a dream

In which I wake up beside you

And you are smiling at me,

My Moshe.

Moshe

I have decided to leave you at the shore of the

Heart where you have roots;

Something holds me back.

Perhaps it is my true self, crying out

For a life without that rattle

Of a pill bottle.

I have a debt to pay for two lives I have taken;

Mine and my firstborn.

You have a debt to pay for your biggest error;

Your firstborn.

Perhaps Neruda did not know, after all, that love cannot thrive

Without poetry.

Perhaps the tug that takes my thoughts back to you

Will be the tug that drowns me.

But that only you can decide,

My soul, my love.

Monsoon

Jerusalem at high tide

Windy old Jerusalem

How I love to hate you

You are the broken and shuttered prison of my people

With this May wind you drive out all the good in me

There is no mercy left for Shavuot.

A Dark Cloud

Sometimes a dark cloud comes upon me even in the happiest of times, and there is nothing I can do but wait for it to pass. I don’t really breathe in those moments. I just think about how much I hate myself for being so essentially weak, so vulnerable, so dependant.

I think about the hopelessness of my life, and how nothing can be fixed, and how I break everything because I cannot bear anything to be less than perfect.

I despise my Jewishness and my femininity and my connection to severe suffering, and the feeling of inescapable obligation. Men are born of freedom, women of self-protection.

I desperately want to be born of freedom. I desperately search for perfection. I desperately hate myself for being second-born, chaya, broken.

When a dark cloud comes, I cannot pass through, under, or beyond it. I wait, and those who love me wait for me.

B’Ahava

Beethoven once wrote ‘be calm; for only by calm consideration of our existence can we achieve our purpose to live together. Never misjudge the most faithful heart of your beloved.’

My beloved Moshe, you are my heart, my head, my humour, my future.

Ever thine.

Ever mine.

Ever ours.