| Lenore Weiss USA
Sh’mah Yisra’el Hear O Israel, from a daughter who can only read the alliterative text of Hebrew with glasses that need a new prescription and a mouth that gets filled with saliva from a tongue that knows not how to deliver two-dotted vowels— Here O Israel from your daughter who was born in the same year you were created, after World War II had folded its charred arms around the only hope that was left— Israel, the land of milk and honey— You were the voice of my parent’s generation who planted trees along new boulevards and carried ashes sewed inside the hem of their clothing to cry along the wadis of your limestone beds, hugging Exodus by Leon Uris. You gave them a bright torch to carry every high holyday for all their days raising money and donating shoes— a reason to drink tea in a glass mug with a lump of sugar coating their tongues with sweetness as they stamped letters, made phone calls, argued with each other in the accent of wherever they’d come from. Israel, my heart is heavy with the dreams of my parents, this second generation daughter who wanted a lasting peace to fill the crevices of your Wailing Wall with a light of its own creation. Instead, only war and massacre, dairy farms and steel plants laid to rubble. Twisted iron stabbing the earth. And the sighs of the six million each time another official invokes their name. String Theory A woman walks down a path in early spring, a firetrail that runs along a creek, bloated with the excess of winter. But today golden poppies are arched to the sun, as the woman spots a brown snake, new in length, stretched across the road, its tongue begging for hand-outs from every rustle. She bends down to see the solicitor. But seeing happens so quickly, even if with her own two eyes, as dragonflies piggyback around her, she touches the string of snake with an outstretched finger. Her act is an instinctual thing, while observing is an acquired art. Never mind. She's in the thick of it now, follows the snake through water, to the other side of the water's bank, until she turns into snake, and twining around him, even his cold blood feels warm. Yom Kippur 2005, Yizkor (Memorial Service) I'm watching darkness embrace a glittering thumbnail someone had trimmed and left years ago for the cleaning lady as it rolled across the floor into breadcrumbs, cat hair, a tissue blown by the opening door into a tent of good-bye kisses, yet the nail, painted glow-in-the-dark still blazing pink, catches the light and is expressed from the room on a braided tassel, as I follow the meditation, but keep wandering to thoughts of my new vibrator, a molded purple plastic water-proof super glide, waiting for me at home tucked between my socks and panties, which I bought the weekend before, while doing food shopping and going for a walk with my friend and her dog, the solemnity of making our days count, well, I want to feel good and I need batteries. That's how I entered the High Holydays. In a blaze. Oslo According to Nina I was the one who brought them water to the table, water poured from a blue pitcher with lemons and ice cubes, not because it was hot in Oslo, but because they were from the Middle East. Every hour I entered the room, the windows covered in white silk banners trimmed with a yellow braid, the banners were the gift of a clothing manufacturer who wanted his name to appear on more than a dress label. My job was to walk up to each crystal glass and see that the levels remained equal. The men read their negotiations by the clock, "Only one more hour to lunch, boys, or, "No one pours water for me like you, Nina," which, yes, is a Russian name. They were not being flirtatious so much as familiar. We were all locked up in the room together trying not to be prisoners. Others brought them food: garbanzos, falafel, hummus. We made sure that the lamb was kosher. They ate the same thing, anyway, men whose suits had been pressed in the desert together, sitting around a table from the old library, which had been rebuilt during the War where I first learned to pour water, water that arches from the lip of a pitcher to the glass without frightening the dove beating her wings against the window. My Muse She loved water and they called me fish, not knowing it was her they really talked about, drifting with fingers webbed until the lifeguards whistled her back. I still have a few pictures of myself as a young girl, my hair already streaked to mark the place she had come from into a frothing foam. For years it seemed she had made me old before my time, Any anchor I threw down she yanked up twirled over her head pounded the waves with her flippers. She always needed to make a big splash. I'd rebuke her. Tell her I was going away. I was never coming back. I was better off without her really. Then she'd grow quiet. Sometimes she wouldn't talk to me for months. I wouldn't know what to do. I'd sit hunched in a corner like this. But the truth is, she pressed her thumb to my heart and let me speak my fear. Of course, she had ulterior motives. She wanted me to get everything out of the way early, even death, so she'd have my undivided attention, so she'd know I'd always be there for her when she rose from the ocean, her mouth encrusted with salt. © Copyright 2007 Lenore Weiss All Rights Reserved. all poems published "Sh'ma Yis'rael," Pudding House Publications, 2007 |
