photo: ralph murre
Here -There
Spring (or Why a Truce)
for the
citizens of Sderot
by Marjorie Stamm Rosenfeld
Here, where
the sky
has
stitched two clouds together,
two brown
doves have been sitting
on the
wall outside my kitchen window,
their
heads at forty-five degrees
of
separation, tails crossed in an X
which
cancels something out.
Do you
remember how hopeful
you
once were each spring—the world
newly
formed and all of it in flower?
Now a
fractured sky. Red dawn.
The
shriek of rockets.
Peach
trees have donned white robes.
Acacias
have put on their crowns.
On your
sill, Cousin, a white butterfly
puts
down, a piece of pale lace fluttering,
impervious
to distance. Even in the desert
there
are these butterflies. The whole
world hatches
out, sky cerulean,
just as
the world,
sprung into
blossom,
breaks.
~ previously published in Before There Is Nowhere to Stand.
