DEAN STREET
By the bus stop, dayshift workers gray-skinned in the April chill, stand lean marbles, granites, samples carved with exemplary names.
She’ll have eaten dinner, girded with a bib, in the last fastidious shafts of
light. Our talk was of the flowering crabapple tree,
its quivering, avenging burst of bloom.
Rain blurs into bluestone snow the heft of ancient dolerite. And the fire-tipped shadows of dusk curtaining the windows of the hall have frightened her.
The bus, its exhalations choked with grime, is bearing down. Even now, I can’t describe for her the weight of this unwieldy, this inhuman thing.
BALANCE
You write, this is not fun. Two rockets arc above Tel Aviv
and in the streets, sirens and rubble. I forget you for weeks at a time
until you write about a trip to Mount Hebron, bellflowers, mignonette,
the grandchild’s bit of tooth, a logy rock agama in the sun.
I hope you’re getting a balanced view. There are bodies in red rags,
pensive cups of coffee after dawn, the drawing heat of the day.
Ordinary death proceeds with its modest civilities, prayers in shul.
In Khan Younis, a family shatters like a crystal cup; no prayer
will bind flesh to soul, no cool wind tame the burning of the coast.
Tell how it is for you, a garden with tall weeds, a son in the hills.
On your land, figs are slowly ripening despite the spider mites,
despite the lack of rain, the sirens louder than a mullah’s call.
Heat underlies the very ground where traders shook out silk.
You hope the dusty rocks and rags will be reported truthfully.
You hope, worried by tomato rot, to grow old
WRITE YOUR POEM
Does your poem setting act as a metaphor? Does your poem use the setting to act as a witness? Consider what literary device you are using for the place you are writing about in your poem. Write your poem in the sandbox of a playground and watch the children erase it.
