The passage of time is the only thing worth feeling

Summer’s gonna come.

I’m waiting for the hot burn
Pink blush
Quiet hush
Morning birds
Night shivers
Still trees
Parched streets
Cicidas.

Summer’s gonna come.

Interiors

The devil inside you

Is an unfathomable thing.

It awakes, it breaks
People, places, things.

I have come to fear you

Like a minor prophet.

It does not bode well

That remorse is not your strong suit.

Couldn’t we take it out,

Study it, and put it to sleep?

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I don’t believe in an interventionist rabbi

My grandmother once told me that life is very long, and that I should prepare myself for the intensity of a prolonged battle.

I feel that my life has been very short, rather, that it has slipped away from me. That I have never really been bound to time and that I have suffered for that. Something in me could not connect to the regularity of the passage of time as played out in other people’s lives.

Perhaps dragging myself out of the ditch I grew up in took so very much of my self-belief and love that there is none left for the second chapter.

Only he who stands at the end and looks back really knows. But he would never reveal any useful tips to me, as it is not in his nature.

What if everything we feel is just an internal response to the quiet rhythm of vast oceans? Tel Aviv, second chances

Strange Light

Heatwaves

Sometimes I catch a glimpse

And I ask myself
Who do you belong to?

Little orphan
Little wretch
Sandy-toed urchin.

You won’t get far.

Just a few continents,

A handful of lifetimes.

Passing Storm

England, oh my England

I cannot read the word ‘Flanders’ without a wrench inside. I cannot think of you, England, nor can I compare it to the other four corners of this earth.

Waking up in the winter room, and my breath is a white mist.

The lead around the windowpane is frosted over.

That I could be reunited with my homeland, that I could ride my horse again, on your crispy, January lawns.

I cannot think of teacups and wallpaper without that wrench.

What on earth am I doing so far from my beloved England? What possessed me?

I suppose, I wanted to be a Good Jew.

How wretched.

Morning

A man on a bicycle approached me on the tayelet.

‘You must be the pinkest girl on earth’, he said.

‘But I’m wearing sunscreen,’ I replied.

‘In what heaven do they make such pink and white girls?’, he asked me.

I roared with laughter.

Still Seas, Erev Yom ha Shoah 5781