Woman Martyr

"The evening goes blind, and you are only twenty."
—Nathan Alterman, “Late Afternoon in the Market”

You are only twenty
and your first pregnancy is a bomb.
Under your skirt you are pregnant with dynamite
and metal shavings. This is how you walk in the market,
ticking among the people, you, Andaleeb Takatka.

Someone loosened the screws in your head
and launched you toward the city;
even though you came from Bethlehem,
the Home of Bread, you chose a bakery.
And there you pulled the trigger out of yourself,
and together with the Sabbath loaves,
sesame and poppy seed,
you flung yourself into the sky.

Together with Rebecca Fink you flew up
with Yelena Konre’ev from the Caucasus
and Nissim Cohen from Afghanistan
and Suhily Houshy from Iran
and two Chinese you swept along
to death.

Since then, other matters
have obscured your story,
about which I speak all the time
without having anything to say.


Olive Tree

shafted, stuck among the three coconut palms
in the layer of gravel from the Home Depot
in the middle of a junction turned overnight
into a square.

Motorists hurrying home
see it perhaps
through clay pots tilting over,
but they have no time for the twisted story
that rises from its trunk or the flat top of the tree,
trimmed with a building contractor’s sense of humor.

Nor can they fathom their roots groping
in foreign soil
clutching mother earth
like provisions from home
since the soldiers cut them down.

The olives, offered and unwanted, blacken
my face
and no miniature roses will divert my heart
from the shame.


from The Dream Notebook

I push my new husband Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair over Swiss mountain ridges, balancing what emerges from his right lobe and disappears diagonally leftward, I shoot a glance at the forested landscape, happy to discover a rope ladder hanging down from a pine tree because stretching is terrific for his disease. The place is also perfect for writing memoirs in old age and the cuckoo bursting from my brain accuses me of marrying him just for this.

From Look There: New and Selected Poems by Agi Mishol. English language translation copyright 2006 by Lisa Katz. All rights reserved.