A poem I wrote about Israel in 2002 . . .

Holy

Sometimes I dream of the desert and forget it’s not real. Then I wake up and forget that it’s real and that I crushed chalky plates of sand under my boots and that a fine layer of dust settled into my pores, all salty and wind-tossed and my hair smelled like salty wind and stuck to my fingers when I tried to run them through.

I wore a sarong and the wind tossed it around and in my shadow I looked like a princess, skirt and hair rippling, faceless, colorless, just flowy, transparent, salty wind grains woven. They kept pressing names, but it didn’t need one because it was my inside out. Flutterings of last butterfly wings and one string of pearls that floated down generations. Each grain, six million, more.

Breath of spices and almonds, dried apricots, maroon fingertips popping pomegranate beads. Different tongues riding exhaust and rubber on pavement. Tzahal olive green always at attention. Barrels of olive juice with scuffed scoopers. Plastic trinkets, bright candy wrappers, whole fish dangling upside down. Gooey cinnamon filling dripping into pants of air. Salty wind grains woven to blocks, edges rounded, and mortar mossed. Solar powered flecks.

Aretz Zahav. Artzeinu. Why do they/we crush you like chalky plates, unravel you, scatter your wind gems, puncture your wings, throw glass through your stones? Yet you clutch us to your breast and we drink you unconditional. What’s parched and cracked, you bloom.