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Poetry || SubmissionsRicky FriesemA Prayer Dead is dead. But please let me die in bed. (Plain dead) Not crimson- pool and carmine-puddle Dead. Not concrete-spattered window-shattered red globs of scarlet Dead. A dripping gore-fruit harvest from the trees just budding in the April mist. “April is the cruelest month,” he wrote. But in his Wasteland only rocks were red. After In the hot stillness of a desert noon a crisp of a man, blade brittle, charred, but still intact, appears to stir, then crumbles in a furnace blast of wind that scatters what was life a flash ago and lifts the ash to swirl in manic pirouettes that dip and rise and turn until the whirlwind dance of death has sucked into its vortex every speck of burn-out black. And then the wind too dies and frees the flakes of soot to flutter down and settle in a smudge upon the yellow sand. Ashes to ashes Dust to dust. It wasn’t meant to be this way. On the Walls of Diyarbakir Yesterday the name meant nothing. Diyarbakir, a tangled string of letters tying up my tongue with unfamiliar sounds that challenged me to mouth them in a word that hung unclaimed by memory until it slipped unhindered from my mind . That was yesterday. Today I stand on blood-black basalt ramparts thick and high and long enough to vie with China’s wall for visibility from space. My Turkish guide, at ease in a gray patch of shade cast by a crumbling watchtower, dispatches ancient history with a flat automaton monotany. His mind is unengaged while mine awakes to the familiar nightmare names. Oh Hittites, and Assyrians, Macedonians and Meds. Oh Persian, Roman, Byzantine .Great Empires. All vanquished, dead, he says. So why then do I tremble as I scan the barren plain? Oh Dyarbakir I know now that your name is fear. Forbidden Love 1. I look into your face and quickly turn away lest adoration tempt the fates and draw the furies down to tear you from me. Now. My son. It wasn’t always so. There was a time I dared to hold you close and draw in deep your baby scent with every breath . to fill the void left in me by your birth. And with my eyes I’d trace your face and learn each curve. It wasn’t hard to memorize those simple lines. I’d marveled at the slant of eye and upturned mouth before. And would again. And still unsated I’d caress your rounded cheek and let my fingers brush with feather stroke the newness of your downy head to feel the gentle pulse of life and let its rhythm synchronize with mine until we were as one again. 2. The rapture of those moment’s now long gone. Replaced in equal measure by the fear that sacrifice is still the price this land demands of radiant youth, and knowledge that the cries of mothers will not stay the sweep of bloody destiny. History Dust Clay Sod Earth Fields Meadows Pastures Land Property Country Nation Motherland Fatherland Homeland Realm Dominion Kingdom Empire Dust Ricky Friesem was born in Canada and moved to Israel with her scientist husband and three sons in 1972. For 25 years she worked as a journalist, editor, and award-winning documentary filmmaker for the Weizmann Institute of Science, whose Communications Department she headed for over a decade. She and her husband live on the campus of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot. In addition to writing poetry, she has co-authored two cook books: Fruits of the Earth (Adama Books, 1985) and Joy of Israel (Steimatzky, 1976). Today's Situation
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