GAZA,1974
I
After dinner with the grandmother –
young wives of the household
are feeding children
and serving dessert to the men.
I am a guest, an English teacher
new to the Middle East,
without even the basic Arabic
most Israelis know
and I cannot play in pantomime –
like my daughter –
with the children and the goats.
I am placed in a bare room
with an old woman
who talks continually
as if eventually
I must understand
her native tongue
Because we are women.
II
When I cannot answer,
even after her long
probing looks, she shrugs,
takes her crochet hook from a pocket,
and points out the window where a girl
plays alone.
Her gnarled hands, wound with pink wool, move easily,
and soon she is making lovely rosettes in the bodice.
I take the hook and try to imitate, slip,
slip again, finally latch through the last eye
to pull the rose together. She smiles,
I show her a stitch of my own
which she examines,
unravels, then duplicates
with a flourish.
…
MABROUK
Confined to the couch by a bad back,
I watch Israel TV with my son.
There is an Arabic program on
and we slowly learn that the man
at the final fitting for a suit
(“Mabrouk, Jamil!”) and the woman
showing her new dress to her best friend
(“Mabrouk, Azziza!”) are getting married.
We watch the men come in to shave the groom,
the women warm the bride with dance and song,
the separate dinners with ululations.
More congratulations, then:
the two groups bring the couple to the square.
And when Azziza and Jamil look at each other
slowly, shyly I begin to cry.
I always cry at chasenes.
…
(Chasenes: Yiddish for wedding )
…
THE SHEIK
(Rahat 2015)
Just give him a coin and in it
he will read your health,
Nissim said, and I ran up to press
ten shekel to his palm.
He does not look at me,
Sheikh Khuwaiti, but reads
my money like my life.
You are strong, he says,
slowly, and Nissim translates,
but you suffer
from dizzy spells.
Until that moment
I had trusted him, sure
he embodied
a truth that transcended
our tongues our sex
all our divergences.
His great following with the Bedouin
of all castes,
his success with endless illnesses,
his way of looking through my lying eyes
His ninety five years of looking
through all our lying eyes.
But I thanked him properly,
and listened as if seriously
as he pulled me aside and whispered,
“Burn incense in your home
on Thursday at three. It will help.
Don’t forget.”
For hours I was distracted.
The luxury of Rahat
impressed me as little
as the shepherds showing us the way.
Why give me a symptom I don’t possess,
when my body is racked with such real pains?
I complain to Nissim
who rocks from foot to foot.
“No no, I wasn’t accurate.
I wanted to save your shame.
“He didn’t say ‘dizzy,’ he said ‘ditsy.’”
The translator thinks it a detail
but I am overjoyed.
If the Sheikh’s world
can reach so deeply into mine
I can believe.
…
THE ARAB-JEWISH CONFLICT
a perspective
It was long ago – my son is now twenty-one
and the blue dress I wore to Maternity
has long been ripped into rags and thrown away,
piece by piece. But that night it was
the most comfortable thing I owned,
and while I was alone waiting in Reception
(the nurses were probably out to dinner,
and my husband didn’t really believe
it was time yet), and leaned against the wall
to counter my backache, I was grateful for it.
I wasn’t alone – the Bedouin woman in her black robe
was also in pain and pushing too against the wall.
But we had no common language,
and could only show each other
what we felt, and what to do.
There were no chairs,
and the gentle lined woman
was my only inspiration and succor,
and I got the idea of crouching in a corner,
pushing at both walls at once
and at the floor as well. Ah, she said,
and joined me in the niche near by.
And I knew she was telling me that corners
were a great invention of society, and I agreed.
Better than the nurses who eventually came along,
picking their teeth and scowling at our primitivity.
We never did
get to talk. Both of us left
with our sons the next day.
…
Poems from “Mechitza” (Cross Cultural Communications, 1986) and “Ignorant Armies” (Cross Cultural Communications, 1994) and “Layers” (Simple Conundrum, 2014).