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Two Poems by Nanette Rayman

3/6/2018

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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.


Author

Nanette Rayman, author of the poetry book, Shana Linda Pretty Pretty,  Project: Butterflies, Foothills Publishing, two-time Pushcart nominee, included in Best of the Net 2007, DZANC Best of the Web 2010, first winner of the Glass Woman Prize for prose. Publications include The Worcester Review, Sugar House Review (poem mentioned at newpages.com), Stirring's Steamiest Six, gargoyle, Berkeley Fiction Review, Editor's Pick for prose at Green Silk Journal, chaparral, Pedestal, ditch, Wilderness House Literary Review, decomp, Contemporary American Voices, featured poet at Up the Staircase Quarterly, Umbrella Factory, Rain, Poetry & Disaster Society, Grasslimb, Pedestal, DMQ Review, carte blanche, Oranges & Sardines, sundog lit, Melusine. Latest poetry at: Writing in a Woman’s Voice. She performed in many off off Broadway plays, studied at Circle in the Square and with Gene Frankel. She graduated from The New School.

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