Israel poems

The Body Transfer

My mom calls to tell me about an article in the Boston Globe:
A young woman, shot dead on her way home from work, two small sons;
When Israel withdraws from Gaza they will have to dig up the body.
“So sad,” she says, “I cut it out to send you in the mail.”

And I know right away she is talking about Ahuva Amergi,
wife and mother, the name I wear etched on a bracelet against my skin.
I can see the red lights at Kissufim Junction that spell out her name in the sky.
I can see baby Chana sitting on my lap as the car speeds through the dunes
towards the Gush Katif Regional Cemetery.

Ahuva was talking to Sarah on her cell phone about the new house
and all the things she wanted to have done inside.
Then Sarah heard shots and she didn’t hear her sister’s voice again.
Rafi took the kids to Spain, and found a new wife. It was just too much.

Kneeling on the floor, I open up the envelope with the article.
“We’re not thinking about where to transfer the body
because we don’t believe we’ll have to leave this place,”
Sarah says to the reporter.

“I thought you might be interested,” my mom wrote on a post-it.
In the picture, the grave is surrounded by smooth white stones along the edges.

She does not know I put them there.

May 2005

Going Away

The sun sets gold among the trailers of Ofra.
Yossi climbs in next to me in the ambulance and laughs.
He has so much joy he is full of stupid jokes but
I need to explain to him that I have to call Elka
because I was supposed to leave Jerusalem by 4:30.

My shift officially ended an hour ago
and there is no way I will be at the Ra’anana Mall by six to meet Elka
and now I am sidetracked by Yossi laughing
and the bright green of all the Palestinian license plates
and the knowledge that this completely normal part of my life
is only minutes away from ending, so soon I will be going away.

Nothing has been more natural to the longing of my hands,
more native to the topography of my soul
than working in an ambulance squinting my eyes
from the blazing sliver of gold in the January Ofra sky
listening to Ivri Lider on the radio, already late to meet
one of my friends at the Ra’anana Mall.

But now we have the siren on and we are speeding down
Kavish Mispar Echad past French Hill, past Har Tzofim,
toward Wadi Al Joz and I haven’t even called Elka yet.
A motorcycle accident, a boy is hurt.
No much worse, a car hit a boy on his bike.
I grab the smallest neck brace I can find.
Ambu. Hamsan. Back board.

He lies by the mangled metal and bent wires of his bike
wide-eyed, wriggling, screaming, but the screaming is a good sign.
His mother is equally hysterical, crouched by his side as I kneel on the pale stone in front of the gas station with my stopwatch, counting beats.
I blink back to my first patient, a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor,
and I remember the way I gingerly took her numbered paperdoll arm, afraid of pressing down too hard, taking three minutes just to find her pulse.

Another crew comes to pick up where we left off and
I dash off to the tachana mercazit to catch the express bus to Ra’anana
as the sun fades behind the Jerusalem hills,
lingering, unable to leave, like me.

I sit with an African-American man from Winnipeg
studying chemistry at the Technion who listens to Damien Rice
and tells me to meet him on this day 80 years from now
at Ra’anana Junction or he is sure we will meet again
in The World to Come.

I get off the bus and it is all so ordinary:
Yossi laughing, the gold Ofra sky, Ivri Lider on the radio, the sirens, the Arab boy wriggling on cement beside his wailing mother,
the religious chemistry major from Winnipeg
who will meet me in The World to Come, Elka and me at the mall and

I can feel how soon this will all be over, how
I will go away. They will say,
“Where did she go with all these books and paper? Why did she march so far away?”
They will not know I have gone far away to come back.
For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out.

Italicized stanza from The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
January 2005

Nervous Mothers and Absorption Center Mothers

The clear Mediterranean blue is not what I expected.
I am used to mucky Atlantic green and blonde-haired toddlers
in fluorescent-flowered bathing suits chased by
seagulls and nervous mothers waving juiceboxes
under a perfect round sun haloed by orange rays
beside a one-dimensional beach house and an ice cream truck.
The Ethiopian mothers let their kids run wild in the sand at night
mid-October after a busy day at gan.
The stars are hotter here, more translucent,
the waves sharp and slick with the possibilities of free will.
At home the nervous juicebox mothers are
taking their kids to soccer practice and ballet,
never to the ocean in the middle of October.
But the absorption center mothers have worried about more
than channeling their children’s energy so
it can be contained as an art or a science and
they are so happy, they love it here,
watching their children, so big so wild
so free, like the sea in mid-October.

April 2004

Bus 19
There are many ways to measure a life: by pulse, by breaths, by longing
by the strength of the explosion,
the impact of the body against its surroundings,
the burns from the heat produced.

In the millisecond of the boom,
we are left purple and gasping, oxygen-starved and squirming
limbs twitch and writhe and disconnect
lungs explode into fiery bursts of red carnation
the dead become the living and the living become the dead
nails rip and puncture pierce and penetrate organs and eardrums
that will perforate and shatter and then
that quiet loss of rhythm, the final shudder–

The lullaby of silence soothes,
smoothing the thousands of broken pieces
until the living and the dead are indistinguishable
in a stillness so raw and so pure so unrestrained
that no one is dead and no one is living.

Entire years lie between the boom and the siren,
countless lives are lived in between those moments,
whole eras have passed before
the first siren that sorts the dead from the living
the gasping from the twitching from the still.

The corpses are empty sockets joining the world
of the composition notebook still perfectly intact
and the bus pass with 8 punches left 50 meters away
the street sticky and slick with runny jew blood
that we will lap up eagerly before the start of the evening news.

Half a world away the blown out husk of bus
and ugly passport pictures of second-chance Israelis are all that will be seen
by people who wake up from their nightmares when the morning comes
and measure their lives by years.

October 2004