In The Middle of This Year
My heart swelled with a child / I drank tea in Tehran / my heart broke in a hollow drum / and sweat Baghdadi blood / gasped in Hebrew letters.
By Maia Zelkha.
I dreamt about my mother,
and inherited my father’s eyes,
was stuck in Ezekiel’s tomb,
was created in seven days,
grew in a womb twice,
and was born alone once.
I was six pounds three ounces,
the sea saw my face and fled,
I lived to seventy,
drowned in the mikvah,
and a pigeon landed on my window,
said nothing, then flew away.
My heart swelled with a child,
I drank tea in Tehran,
my heart broke in a hollow drum
and sweat Baghdadi blood,
gasped in Hebrew letters.
My grandfather ran from one rooftop
to the next, tore his pants jumping.
I was spit into the sea,
running away from God,
running from Iraq,
running to Iran.
I brushed your hand,
calloused from fighting.
You winced from my touch.
Our old house was painted with salt water,
I touched your eyelids with waterlogged fingers,
the scrolls of our ancestors burned,
you mourned a song.
I heard a distant oud,
was covered in smoke,
ate from a carob tree,
fell asleep for a hundred years,
woke up in Shechem,
and filled my pockets with dates.
I wrote letters to God.
He gave me no reply.
I daydreamed about a place
I have never been,
dreamed about ancient temples
and sandalwood perfume,
how Moses’s tablets crumbled to sand,
how our prayers became spun gold,
and how our people were never slaves,
no such thing as pity or indifference,
the only thick guttural sounds to exist
in this world being in a dialect full of secrets,
not Arabic, not Hebrew,
but the sweet babbling of a baby.
Maia Zelkha is the editor of Yad Mizrah Magazine.