1.
Like soft yellow clouds speckled in brown,
the Masai giraffes cross the Kenyan safari.
I was a giraffe once, too, in my mind,
even though I was the shortest in my class,
hanging on to high branches
to be nourished from above—
my imagination, books, arts.
On the earth, lonely, not matching my classmates,
vigilantly searching from my distance after possible dangers.
A child in the Ramat Sharet elementary school in Jerusalem
with her head up in the mountains of Africa,
reading repeatedly ‘Lobengulu King of Zulu’ by Nachum Guttman.
“What is your favorite animal of them all?”
I asked Francis, our tour guide in the Masai Mara safari.
He came with rifle and khaki uniform,
as if camouflaged as a solider.
“The giraffes,” he answered instinctively.
“They hurt no one,”
said the man who has known them from before I was born.
2.
As I’m about to turn fifty, half a century, I’m awakened
by the October 7th massacre in Israel,
by the unrestful sleep since it happened
and a war that follows.
It’s the giraffes that come
to visit in my dream.
I see two of them,
perhaps a mother and daughter,
in my building’s backyard,
tall enough to peek into my window
too tall to be protected from the rockets
in the zoo near us,
an open space one,
called Safari.
Too tall to be hidden
in a bomb shelter, with us,
the neighbors brought them here
to lean against our small building
to be sheltered from the bombings.
The day after I pack my daughters,
we buy books at the airport,
and leave for Greece.
We are based next to the Acropolis
perhaps its outcrop and all it stands for
so many decades
will protect us.