January 2025
Bio Note: I am looking forward to the publication of my memoir in essays and poems, Apartness (Inlandia Books), in February, 2025. In these difficult times, I take refuge in writing and reading poems, when I can. I hope our V-V community is finding solace.
The Dream
For eons, we cannot talk, my brother, my sister.
I am one of them to you; you are one of them to me.
And we each know—knives held between our teeth—
how murderous the other is, or wants to be.
Our stories calcify in isolation, yours a holy shrine
visited only by your people, mine a holy shrine,
visited only by mine.
But then, as ages pass like clouds
in time-lapse video, something you say,
my sister, my brother, pierces my armor.
A small, surprising chink has already appeared
in yours, like the sun startling at dawn
on the Summer Solstice, behind the Heel Stone
at Stonehenge.
For many generations more, we live
with the inconvenience of incomplete
defenses. And now comes the point when
the dream wants desperately to pull
the rabbit of hope out of the black
hat of horror. But the dreamers
say to the dream There is no magic. Or, How arrogant!
You cannot possibly know my lived experience.
Still, the dream keeps beginning, dreaming itself,
fantasizing. One night, when I am dreaming,
one of my people names her first-born son
with two names, one in my language,
one in yours. One night, when you are dreaming,
one of your people names his first-born daughter
with two names, one in his language, one in mine.
Let us imagine Ezra Bassam, let us imagine Hanan Ahava—
each child born with an imaginary sibling,
a brother, or sister bound to him or her, with whom
each freely walks on the land they love,
practicing, practicing…
Originally published in One Art
Reaction to Diagnosis of Sorrow to Come
Our little house is floating out
to sea, taking on water, the books
we never culled pulping out
and falling off the tilting shelves,
our saved letters spilling from their box—
ink blurring and lifting off.
The lounge and sofa, the ottomans
and end tables all slide downwards
as our home half-crests the oncoming
wave, the two of us bobbing close
to the ceiling, like an ancient doomed
Chagall bride and groom.
If only there were life-preservers on ropes
to be thrown, if only there could be a chopper
dropping a ladder from the sky we could both
safely climb. If only there were a harbor we could
settle in, with a view that never changed.
Originally published in One Jacar Press.
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to say what it is about the poem you like. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -JL