Women Hold Your Breath If only women weren’t so lovely. If only women didn’t hold onto your breath for you. Even a hoopoe need haystacks and abandoned burrows For she is made of pyrotechnics and her heart puffs Only for the man blinded in battle for the love of her. If only women didn’t steal away your love from you The way a cowbird so inclement steals other bird’s eggs. If only women weren’t so carefree and careless, sunning Their bodies curvy as Paraguay like Common Murre birds Laying their eggs freely on cliffs, wild without a nest. If only chicks emerging from vibrantly green/blue eggs Didn’t signal they are so sweet and healthy, you wouldn’t Be tempted to feed them. If only woman weren’t soft as ice cream, if only they weren’t at it again, acting like the sun, ribboning all over the place, all over the pavement like the moon plaiting the window in gold. There they go again— blossoming in the park, on the 6 train and like zinnias and dahlias of wise icicles on a February window they blow your mind. If only you would smile And say: Come, come fly away with me in your blue Bird choreographed graceful dress. You are so lovely. אילן חלימ (Ilan Halimi) In 2006 a gang called gang de les Barberes kidnapped and tortured Ilan Halimi in a suburb of Paris. Ilan escaped after three weeks. He died on the way to the hospital. Plummeting from the forest that night Into the grimy streets of Bagneux Was a handsome man named Ilan Halimi. Was there sunlight above Bagneux After he died; was the sun truly working Or a conjunctivitis Eye only watching Like an overfed le gendarme for more Barbarians hidden in plain sight? Hate for the Jew detonates winter doesn’t want to stop or wait for spring. It goes Koran-jihad tilling the wasteland, the no Go zone of Bagneux. Taping up Ilan’s bones, burning them for cred-- Ambushing him, Starving him, burning his whole body, tying him to a chair, Held at gunpoint for three weeks—O where is the blue sky now? 1400 year’s promise knows to plant torture while Israelis plant trees Atop hills and in gardens of spring. Fofana’s stagnant doggedness makes him deleterious, Always you were deleterious, anti-Semitic, “religion” had everything to do with it. You came like a brick wall, lunging and jihad-spell Bound O your dogged reading of the Koran-- You wild dog, do you comprehend Your life forever behind bars? I wonder if G-d, as if to repair the terror, Or annul with reckless audacity of magic, Sent a cassowary with a slicer like a shuttle Slipping between gang les barbere’s threads of dark- Shadow, to make it clear that the pink-eye sun or the bullets of rain In particular are pieces of bat-winged savages, whose glowers mimic the murderers essence, portend a coming, a new Charles Martel, a new Kahane crouched in the clouds, which have the form and color of anemones hung in a gorgeous Blue and White sky. First I’ll plant the sapling; you rest, Ilan. Your journey is over. The clouds are lovely as they dance by. Erez – cedar is my choice. I give this prayer each year to you, Ilan with words As if I were a true rabbi, a Kahane, a warrior, A woman in America, a Jew, who mourns. |