As a child

Hello darkness, my old friend,

I’ve come to rest by you again.

My head, my heart, my life is dwindling-

I’ve seen the whispers of a soft ending.

And the stars say the lines on my hand will change when I unclutch, unwind, but I must find,

A safe place to rest my mind.

Advertisement

Damage

A broken thing is a broken thing.

Broken things do not become unbroken.

Even if we reassemble them, damage remains.

Weakness in a country at war- the weakness of broken things- is the enemy of the people.

Pain

A world of pain is your world.

You inhabit a world so painful it spits you out on the shore of a numb evening.

From time to time the pain becomes so unbearable that you try to end it by ending yourself, not realising that you are merely a vehicle for the pain until its next destination.

There is no end.

Once you have realised this, you turn on the pain and make war on this great demon of life, swearing all of your strength against it.

It is a sad waste of time, because this pain was generated long before you pushed your way into this world, and there is no reward for fixating on it, or for searching for solutions.

You start to wonder if emotional pain can be befriended in the same way that physical, chronic pain can be lived with.

You have doubts, but hope has become a way of life for you.

War

I remember

How I came to you for tea

And recounted

The swastika and the madonna;

How I had seen them nestled together in the window of the pasticceria.

How I had stood there shaking

For you sabba,

For you savta.

For my mother’s cousins that never were,

For my father’s brothers that never came to be.

In the quiet suburb of Firenze,

A madonna guarded her flag-

Her blood red flag.

My blood ran cold.

Here I am,

Six years later in Israel.

I barely remember ‘Salve’ Salvatore of the Subway,

Who rescued me from nazis on a wintry night,

And brushed off

That blood red flag as ‘quelli pazzi’.

Here I am in Israel-

Pondering the cracks in the land I have come to love,

Pondering the traumas of the people, my people.

I no longer want to replenish my people,

Or rush to conceive and step over the cruel, bitter core of history unremembered, history retold to me.

Memory.

The traumas are there.

They live with me-

They live in me.

But I live-

I live, beyond the soft whisper of the present past.

To Home, a nod to Yeats

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;

She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.

She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;

But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,

And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.

She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;

But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

Traumas

Perhaps I cannot sleep

Because I have so much to bury

Upon arising.

So much to bury and so deep.

So much to swallow, as it happens-

The best place to hide

Secrets is inside.

Love is short, forgetting is long

You once said, Pablo, that

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Here the forgetting is short, but we are a broken people.

Little more can be expected of those who move to the darker side of the rippling separation of the Mediterranean.

“Yetzt ken men farshtein.”

My broken heart

Lies lightly on your conscience.

You do not even remember me.

Antwerpen

Ten years later

I am still running.

I am still on that train, wedding gown stuffed into a suitcase.

Why take it with me?

Perhaps it was a symbol of hope

At a point of departure from

Innocence.

Teshuva

Perhaps it is not that you brought me closer to G-d

But closer to myself

In a life-threatening way.

To be this clear-

To see myself in all my painful sweetness.

That is the most dangerous return.