BLACKOUTS
Out of a sense of purity: blackout.
No other voice of any other
(God.)
No other voice
comes to her tiny garden.
No rain
but stinging nettles,
and no other soul but hers, parched.
On the footpath, a blue cypress, unhurt.
Tall as a July sun, reaching.
Its own opal halo flung wide on the landscape.
Wild and bruised.
Blackout.
~
Bruises on the damp nature.
Far from the sound of the lure.
What was it she promised when she was an imaginative child
whispering hard at her own low window, mouth to that low
opening—was it to love? to be better than any sword?
curled at her air-slit in between the house-stones
no higher than her two hands— window no larger than
her face, burning?
There— her sky— there— her sky— its feral, cobalt voice,
and sun that tasted of young honey.
A girl called Joan who would ask a thousand times—
“To shut me out from the light of the sky?”
Who thought a nation
could be ordained.
No other voice, a thousand times.
Like bees.
(for Joan of
AGAIN, THE CRADLE
i.
Again, the cradle. The bough breaks, the cradle,
quiet while lions wear their war weeds, bury silence,
quiet while a child in stains screams —everything,
everything here smells like the gas!
her propeller hands like trapped rabbits, twitching,
my hair, my mouth, my breasts —look!
her tiny fingers try
cracking the bough, collapsing the cradle—
look! my grandmother's bracelets all buried—
Look, no face! Look, it's morning.
Look, it's God. In Gaza
Bandwagons line for each abject word —
where wheels don't stop exploded infants' fists,
or mother-skulls, lost, lost mornings—
Brave holy land war.
Bright. Sun-split.
Where the bough has killed its cradle.
Bright, sun-lit ash,
its inexcusable shroud, rocking.
ii
They swept the dead like loosened crumbs from their fingertips, claws, curled. Brushed the dust, swallowed handfuls, hungry. Invented noise— in all that silence.
iii
An egg in her tiny right hand, blinded, seraph-child, she—was what was left of what had finished. Small-winged cataract, not much more. Killed
cradles, and skins, and old men, and kissing—stopped. Egg, in her sweaty small right hand, that hatchling meant for morning. Morning meant for saving. Or yet another prophet.
Prove it.
iv
She stole an egg
from the beast's bed—reeking, heaving nest builder.
Stepped blind, like vengeance. A cinder, empty eyed.
Hovered like a cloud of summer wasps.
Shifted, a gaunt lighthouse onto
promise, across all slaughter.
Reached. —Held it.
What emerged bit her. What cracked its shell
licked her. What emerged, wanted her.
To do it all again.
v.
It didn't happen that way. She held the egg she'd stolen from God's nest and He whispered to her: Good riddance to it and to you. See if you can do any better with this one.
I tried and I'm tired of making eggs. Believe you stole it if that makes you feel brave or dangerous. Blessings. He showed his teeth.
It never—mattered, which came first, the father, or the mother, or the egg. Go ahead, my good thief. Go ahead, my bad angel. Bless. Happy morning. She held the warm oval.Held the breaking, mottled, hot ellipse. Couldn't remember— why. —Breathed it. Waited to feel a nervous thin-skinned thrum. One heartbeat.
She held it for such a long winter.
Hyacinths were blooming in January. Snows froze them, washed them. Still, she held it.
Her eye like the promise she finally remembered— but from whom?—on a sparrow.
(for Gaza
[NOTE. Margo Berdeshevsky’s newest book Between Soul & Stone was published last month by Sheep Meadow Press inRhinebeck , New York
[NOTE. Margo Berdeshevsky’s newest book Between Soul & Stone was published last month by Sheep Meadow Press in
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